Investment firm mortgages Plantation office park for $43M

The owners of a 77-acre office plaza in Plantation, known as the Motorola Solutions campus, just refinanced the property with a $43 million loan, Broward County records show.

The loan was issued by the PrivateBank and Trust Company, which is headquartered in Chicago, to the ownership — a company titled 8000 West Sunrise. The LLC is managed by Torburn Partners, a privately owned Illinois-based real estate company that acquires, develops and manages commercial properties.

The company paid $38.1 million to acquire the campus from Motorola in 2013. The sale was financed with a $29 million loan from KeyBank.

The complex, at 8000 West Sunrise Boulevard, is split into two large parcels: the central one that stretches roughly 23 acres and houses a large, single-story office building with 339,813 square feet of space, and an attached 54-acre parcel that wraps around the main building and includes most of the property’s green space, its two man-made lakes, several parking lots and a handful of smaller structures with 514,749 square feet of space.

In February, several notices of commencement were filed for demolition on the property, headed by the Demcon Group of Plantation.

That includes the destruction of a small building in the southwest corner of the campus, removing connecting links between between some of the buildings, removing the on-campus cafe’s awning and terrace, and removing an antenna on the property — likely left over from when Motorola occupied the campus.

The complex was built in the 1970s and has been long occupied by Motorola, which had roughly 2,500 employees before layoffs last year that brought the number down to a few hundred, according to an article in the Sun-Sentinel. Motorola signed a long-term lease with Torburn when it purchased the property.