Boston Properties said it agreed to sell Carnegie Center, a 2 million-square-foot office park in Princeton, N.J., to a joint venture between Normandy Real Estate Partners and the Landis Group for $468 million.

In January, Doug Linde, president of Boston Properties, said the company might sell most or all of the 16-building complex, as part of a group of suburban properties that it was thinking about selling.

“I talked to Carnegie Center and we’re recapitalizing to sell a significant portion or a full on the entire Carnegie Center asset base depending on what that pricing looks like,” Linde told analysts in the January call, according to a transcript from SeekingAlpha.com. “We’d like to try and retain management and development because we still control the land for another seven-plus years and that will kind of play out.”
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Boston Properties’ Mortimer Zuckerman and John Hancock TowerMortimer Zuckerman’s Boston Properties closed on the $930 million acquisition of the John Hancock Tower in Boston, in what is the largest pure investment purchase in the country this year, the deal’s brokers, Cushman & Wakefield, said in a statement today.
The real estate investment trust Boston Properties bought the 1.7 million-square-foot tower at 200 Clarendon Street and a garage, located at 100 Clarendon Street, from a joint venture between private equity firms Normandy Real Estate Partners and Five Mile Capital Partners. Broadway Partners bought the building in 2006 for $1.3 billion, but lost it after defaulting on its loans. Normandy and Five Mile acquired it in March 2009 for $661 million. TRD
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Mezzanine lenders are swooping in to seize control of an increasing
number of properties when owners fall behind on mortgage payments.
Fortress Investment Group foreclosed on Sheffield57, and Normandy Real
Estate Partners and Five Mile Capital spent nine months buying up
discounted debt so that they could foreclose on Boston’s John Hancock
Tower and a building in Los Angeles. In Manhattan, more foreclosures
are likely, with 130 troubled properties worth $7.5 billion, according
to Real Capital Analytics. But foreclosures are complicated because
many buildings have tiered financing, and each lender has some rights
to a building. [more]