Flurry of land deals sealed in area

Huge real-estate deals continue to be made around the Seattle area as buyers and sellers hurry to finish in time to celebrate the holidays.

Yesterday, in the year's biggest deal for office-park space, the WestPark Business Park in Redmond was purchased for $111 million by the huge investment management company RREEF.

The seller was the other huge acronym: international investment manager TIAA-CREF. Both RREEF, an arm of Deutsch Bank, and TIAA-CREF, which manages pension funds for teachers and college professors, have been active buyers and sellers in the Seattle area this year.

The WestPark deal was one of three notable transactions that closed yesterday. Boeing sold 14 acres of surplus property in the I-90 corridor in Bellevue for development into office space, and the three-building Elliott West complex in Seattle sold for $117 million, according to papers filed with King County.

The 21-building WestPark complex, near Highway 520, is about 80 percent used for office space and has been the birthplace of many Eastside tech companies, including InfoSpace.

Scott Davis of CB Richard Ellis, which represented the seller in the deal, said the complex went on the market in mid-October.

"The interest level was very high," Davis said. "There was no shortage of buyers."

WestPark totals 776,806 square feet of space, meaning RREEF paid about $143 a square foot, testament to the power of location. By contrast, the next-largest deal for this category of building in the region this year was the $73 million purchase of a 1.5 million-square foot business park in Fife, near Tacoma. That's about $48 a square foot.

The Boeing land near I-90 was sold for $15 million to Schnitzer Northwest, which is planning a three-building office complex totaling about half a million square feet.

Boeing has been making a major effort to unload unneeded property since 2001, making possible several major developments, including the Landing, a shopping-retail-apartment complex east of the 737 plant in Renton.

The three-building Elliott West complex is on Elliott Avenue just west of Queen Anne in Seattle. Developed by Koehler & Co., its tenants include F5 Networks and ClearChannel. The buyer, according to documents, is CLPF Elliott West.

Tom Boyer: 206-464-2923 or tboyer@seattletimes.com