Uptown Station sold again
A major Oakland office building leased by Square has been sold to a Singaporean company, a sign of strength for tech office buildings despite a workfromhome shift.
CIM Group sold the property at 1955 Broadway, known as Uptown Station, in the fourth sale of the building since 2014.
CIM declined to disclose the buyer, but Real Capital Analytics, a real estate data firm, listed it as Mapletree Investments in Singapore. A person with knowledge of the deal confirmed it was Mapletree, which is paying around $420 million.
That’s more than double what CIM Group paid in 2017, when it bought the building for $180 million from Uber, which had previously planned a major office hub in the building.
The former Sears building was vacant at the time. Square leased all 356,000 square feet of office space in 2018, drastically increasing the property’s value.
“The sale of Uptown
Station in this uncertain economic climate reflects the development of a desirable building in a growing community that seeks to deliver strong and stable income,” Avi Shemesh, cofounder of CIM Group, said in a statement. He called the building a “truly modern creative office property to a burgeoning district.”
The Alameda County ClerkRecorder’s Office said no deed had been recorded, but it typically takes days or weeks to process filings. CIM said the sale was completed on Tuesday.
Square was on the verge of opening its office in the upper floors of the building last spring when the coronavirus pandemic struck. The company has now adopted a longterm remote work policy that allows all employees to stay home permanently unless their job requires them to be in an office. Before the pandemic, Square had listed around a third of the office space for sublease because it didn’t immediately need all the space. It’s unclear how much space the company now plans to occupy. Square said it doesn’t have a timeline for reopening offices and will monitor government orders.
Downtown Oakland has been quiet during the pandemic, particularly the area around the 19th Street BART Station that includes Uptown Station. Nearby bars and music venues like the Paramount and Fox theaters have been closed for nearly a year. Nonessential offices remain banned from opening until Alameda County reaches the orange tier.
Uptown Station saw one retail tenant, Shake Shack, recently open in the first activity in the building since 2014. The rest of the 50,000squarefoot ground floor is built for additional restaurants and shops.
New housing is still rising in Oakland. The 400foothigh Atlas project, the city’s secondtallest building, was completed last year. Separately, CIM Group said Thursday that it had wrapped up construction of the 333unit Channel House apartment project in Jack London Square. Last year, CIM finished 288 apartments at 1150
Clay St. near City Hall.
Mapletree has real estate holdings around the world valued at $45 billion as of March 2020. Its U.S. properties include apartments, logistics buildings and data centers. The company couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.
Foreign investment in U.S. real estate fell during the pandemic, according to Real Capital Analytics, as urban centers were filled with uncertainty during health orders that shuttered most offices. The sale of San Francisco’s Transamerica Pyramid was delayed for months, but completed in October in a deal that included major German investors.
The Uptown Station deal is one of the largest building sales ever in Oakland. A 1 millionsquarefoot office complex, 300 Lakeside Drive, where PG&E is planning to move its headquarters, sold for $450 million last October.