Kilroy Realty will pay $185M for Culver City media-focused office campus: sources

The “Blackwelder” campus in Culver City may sell for nearly 25% above asking

Blackwelder office campus and Kilroy CEO John Kilroy
Blackwelder office campus and Kilroy CEO John Kilroy

Lincoln Property Company has found a buyer for its 19-building office campus in increasingly media-focused Culver City, The Real Deal has learned.

Prolific investor Kilroy Realty is in escrow to pay $185 million for the complex, roughly 23 percent above the projected price, sources said. The deal for the “Blackwelder” campus pencils out to $1,173 per square foot.

The adaptive reuse project, located on the corner of La Cienega Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue, spans 157,600 square feet across the 19 standalone buildings. With an industrial look, it is mostly geared toward media and entertainment tenants.

Lincoln Property put the office complex on the market for sale in the summer. The first round of bids — expected to fetch as much as $150 million — closed late July.

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Cushman & Wakefield had the listing. Kilroy and Lincoln Property declined to comment.

Kilroy is among the biggest real estate developers based in Los Angeles. The firm is in the midst of developing one of its largest projects, dubbed Academy on Vine, in Hollywood. The $450 million project is slated to include a 193-unit residential building, plus three office towers. Netflix signed on to occupy 355,000 square feet of office space at the complex late last year.

Culver City, however, has also become an attractive alternative to Hollywood and Santa Monica for media and entertainment tenants. HBO recently inked a deal for its new headquarters in Culver City, joining Apple and Amazon.