Hilton Foundation pays $50M for Dole Foods HQ in Westlake Village

Debt-riddled Dole recently sold a stake of its business to a European competitor

Conrad Hilton and the Dole building
Conrad Hilton and the Dole building

The Conrad N. Hilton Foundation paid $50 million to acquire the Westlake Village headquarters of fruit and vegetable company Dole Food Company, The Real Deal has learned.

Dubbed the Dole Building for its long-standing tenant, the 168,000-square-foot corporate campus at One Dole Drive features a three-story office building that sits on nearly 10 acres.

Dole will continue to occupy a portion of the building, according to CBRE, who brokered the off-market deal. Meanwhile, the Hilton Foundation, which was already a tenant, will relocate its headquarters from a building two miles away.

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Todd Tydlaska, Sean Sullivan, Mike Longo, Tom Dwyer and Michael Slater at CBRE represented Dole in the sale.

Dole has been struggling amid declining revenues and mounting debt. In July, Dole completed a deal to sell 45 percent of its company to Ireland-based Total Produce. The deal was worth $300 million. Prior to the sale, billionaire David Murdock, who owns Dole, had planned to take it public with a $400 million initial public offering in April 2017. Those plans were scuttled in January.

As part of Dole’s cost-saving measures, the firm put its corporate campus on the market late last year. Greenyard, another European food company, was close to purchasing the building and company around the same time. That deal, which ultimately fell through, would have seen Dole exchanging its headquarters for a plantation theme park in Hawaii.

The Hilton Foundation, founded by hotel entrepreneur Conrad Hilton, is a nonprofit institution whose causes include HIV and AIDS, poverty and homelessness, among others.