Banyan Street Capital buys downtown Fort Lauderdale office tower

Miami-based Banyan Street Capital paid $81.5 million for an office tower in downtown Fort Lauderdale, marking the first major office sale in the city in months, property records show.

Banyan Street acquired the 200 East Broward building in a joint venture with funds managed by Oaktree Capital Management. The seller is Realty Associates Fund X LP, an affiliate of Boston-based TA Realty.

The Banyan Street and Oaktree joint venture spent $360 per square foot on the 226,000-square-foot, 21-story Class A tower. It financed the sale with a $55.5 million mortgage from MetLife. CBRE’s Christian Lee, Jose Lobon and Amy Julian arranged the sale and financing. Colliers International South Florida’s Jonathan Kingsley, and Jarred Goodstein and Keeley O’Leary of Colliers Property Management also worked on the deal.

The office tower was built in 1992 and includes eight stories of podium parking. Records show the TA Realty affiliate paid $66.4 million for the building in 2014 and spent $5.7 million on renovations. Rents have grown 43 percent since then but are still 39 percent below market, according to CBRE. It’s 95 percent leased to 22 tenants who have an average of nearly seven years left on their leases.

The deal marks the first large office sale in downtown Fort Lauderdale since February when Crocker Partners sold the 28-story office tower at 100 Southeast Third Avenue to Walton Street Capital for nearly $87 million, or $314 per square foot.

In May, Greystar paid $19.5 million for the office building at 790 East Broward Boulevard, but plans to develop the roughly 2-acre site into a 25-story apartment tower with retail space.