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David Ellison’s Skydance buying Santa Monica office campus for $350M: sources
Co-working giant WeWork recently signed a long-term lease at the 4-building Lantana complex
Skydance Media founder David Ellison is close to purchasing two buildings in the Lantana office complex for about $350 million, The Real Deal has learned. The deal for the Santa Monica location works out to $1,250 per square foot.
The deal is expected to close Friday. The two properties, Lantana Center and Lantana West, are known as the north campus and together, total 278,680 square feet.
The sellers are Artisan Realty Advisors and Brightstone Capital Partners. The joint venture is also gearing up to market the south portion of the campus comprising two buildings and spanning 203,700 square feet. Eastdil Secured is handling the south campus sale, sources said.
Representatives for Skydance and Artisan Realty, both of Santa Monica, declined to comment. New York-based Brightstone could not be reached.
The deal comes on the heels of a big WeWork lease at the property. In late January, the co-working giant — now called We Company — signed a long-term lease to occupy 116,000 square feet at the Lantana Center at 3000 Olympic Boulevard, occupying roughly half of the building.
Skydance currently occupies 25,000 square feet each at offices in Santa Monica, Mid-Wilshire and Marina del Rey. It’s likely the firm will consolidate those offices into Lantana, a source familiar with the deal said.
Artisan Realty teamed up with Brightstone to purchase the entire campus — all four buildings at Olympic and Exposition boulevards — for $400 million from Jamestown in November 2016. The deal worked out to $825 per square foot.
Amenities at the Class A site include recreation areas, outdoor lounges, food trucks, screening room and laundry service.
Skydance, which recently made headlines for hiring disgraced animation guru John Lasseter as head of animation, will be joining Beachbody and Tennis Channel at the campus. Beachbody signed a deal to occupy 200,000 square feet at Lantana south buildings in May 2016. It then subleased about 50,000 square feet to the Tennis Channel in March 2018.
The deal comes nearly three years after Ellison’s father, Larry Ellison, paid $368 million, or $1,165 per square foot, for another office building in Santa Monica. The elder Ellison, who co-founded Oracle, broke a record at the time for the priciest deal on a per square foot basis.