Home of ‘The Negotiator’ for sale

Priceline just one of several tenants in Norwalk building

A Norwalk office building is for sale that is home to one of Connecticut’s most famous homegrown companies — with the seller hoping to cash out at a multimillion dollar premium after four years of ownership.

CBRE Global Investors has put the RiverPark building at 800 Connecticut Ave. on the market for $56 million, about $7.4 million more than the price it paid in October 2015 to acquire the building, but well below its appraised value.

Booking Holdings and subsidiary Priceline have their headquarters at RiverPark, which is located just off Interstate 95 close by the Darien border. Constructed in 1981, RiverPark has undergone more than $7 million in renovations under CBRE ownership, with the firm declining to comment on what drove the decision to sell in response to a Hearst Connecticut Media query.

CBRE has brought in multiple new tenants for the facility which totals more than 400,000 square feet, including thermocouple designer Omega Engineering, which moved its main office there from Stamford where it had been an institution for a halfcentury; and Remedy Partners, an insurance startup under Oxford Health Plans founder Steve Wiggins which is now merging with a Texas company.

At more than 90,000 square feet, Booking Holdings is the dominant tenant, with the company maintaining separate offices in Stamford for its Kayak travel search engine subsidiary. Paychex and Hitachi Capital each occupy close to 25,000 square feet.

According to CBRE, RiverPark is about 70 percent leased, with Fairfield County’s overall commercial office availability rate at about 25 percent of all space as of the second quarter.

RiverPark becomes overnight the most expensive office listing in Connecticut among those listed on the LoopNet commercial real estate website, though with CBRE pricing the building at a significant discount from the appraised value of more than $87 million assigned to the building last year by the city of Norwalk.

Only two properties fetched a higher price in the past year is the Royal Bank of Scotland building at 600 Washington Blvd. in Stamford, sold for $163 million last spring; and 100 W. Putnam Ave. in Greenwich, which tallied $130 million.

In a review of commercial real estate markets nationally released this summer, the brokerage firm Newmark Knight Frank calculated a 2.3 percent increase in dollar volume of investment sales to $127 billion, with another $204 billion in reserve for buyers scouting acquisitions.

Suburban office buildings were generating an average return of 7.4 percent for sellers, Newmark Knight Frank determined, though with that figure pulled up by transactions in southeastern and western states.

“The buyer pool for commercial real estate remains deep and fundraising is high,” Newmark Knight Frank researchers wrote in the report.

Hearst Connecticut Media file photo The terrace of the multitenant RiverPark office building at 800 Connecticut Ave. in Norwalk. The building’s tenants include the Priceline Group