Fandango closing on 85K sf lease in Beverly Hills

Ticket seller Fandango Media is riding high on recent acquisitions — including the purchase of Flixster and Rotten Tomatoes from Warner Brothers Entertainment. Soon, the Comcast-owned company will also have a flashy 90210 headquarters address to prove it has arrived.  

Fandango is close to sealing the deal on a lease for roughly 85,000 square feet at Tishman Speyer’s 407 North Maple Drive building in Beverly Hills, The Real Deal has exclusively learned. The move will add about 35,000 square feet to the company’s L.A. footprint.

Sources with knowledge of the transaction said the firm will take roughly half of the 168,442-square-foot building. Asking rent is listed on CoStar as $66 a square foot a year, which would value the lease at $5.6 million a year.

The asking rent is roughly in line with area averages. However, it’s possible that Fandango got a discount. The property has been vacant since Fox Interactive Media left a few months ago, when its lease expired. Leasing to Fandango, and any further leasing of the property, will help prevent Tishman from having problems refinancing the $220 million CMBS loan against the building and two other nearby properties: 335-345 North Maple Drive and 9232-9250 Beverly Boulevard.

The loan for the buildings, called the Maple Drive Portfolio, is securitized through JPMorgan Chase Commercial Mortgage Securities Trust, and matures next June, according to Trepp. The loan remains current.

Another property in the Maple Drive Portfolio could face vacancy in the near future. Netflix occupies 91,195 square feet at 335-345 North Maple Drive, but is likely to move out when its lease expires in August 2018, given that it just leased a whopping 323,000 square feet in Hollywood, as The Real Deal first reported.

Unlike Netflix, Fandango has less incentive to be in Hollywood proper. Sources with knowledge of the deal said the company would use the space at 407 North Maple for traditional offices, with no major tenant renovations planned.

David Toomey of Cresa represented Fandango in the deal but declined to comment. John Ollen, Patrick Nally and Melinda Mechoso were the internal representatives for Tishman Speyer, and declined requests. Fandango, additionally, could not be reached.

The move is a major expansion for Fandango, which currently takes 50,000 square feet at West L.A.’s Westside Media Center at 12100-12312 West Olympic Boulevard. It will vacate that property and fully relocate to Beverly Hills, sources said.

Tishman acquired the newly constructed building at 407 North Maple for $72 million in 2005 from a partnership between David Geffen and Bernard Salick. Geffen and Salick put the property on the market after they were unable to convince the Beverly Hills City Council to allow them to use the facility at as cardiac care center.