Joint venture looks at Seattle’s first office-home conversion since pandemic

Stream Real Estate and Marymoor Storage Partners want to launch the first office-to-home conversion project in Seattle since the pandemic.

An affiliate of the locally based Stream and Marymoor Storage bought a five-story office building at 201 Queen Anne Avenue North for $7 million, with plans to turn it into 68 homes, the Puget Sound Business Journal reported. The seller was East-West Investment, based in Seattle.

East-West bought the 52,300-square-foot Queen Anne Plaza building in 2005 for $7.9 million. 

The Stream affiliate and Marymoor Storage Partners, based in Bellevue, acquired a respective 55 percent and 45 percent of the property for 52 percent of its assessed value, according to the newspaper.

Plans call for converting the Lower Queen Anne building into 68 apartments, with parking for 66 cars, with no offices, shops or restaurants, according to a feasibility study filed by Stream. It would include indoor and outdoor “amenity spaces” on the fifth floor, plus an “urban farm.”

The project, designed by Seattle-based Board & Vellum, lists the cost of the conversion work at $12 million. The combined cost of the building and its conversion work out to $279,412 per unit.

Colliers noted the conversion plan in its fourth-quarter office report, saying it’s the first local example of an office-to-residential conversion. It said the building was “a prime example” of what offices make sense for conversion, including a desirable neighborhood, smaller floor plates of 13,000 square feet, Class B offices built in 1985, and totally vacant.

Dan Dahl, a senior vice president at Colliers, said the smaller floor plates are key, providing a relatively short distance from the apartment front door to the windows.

“You can’t have a bowling alley-like space with a window at the end of it,” Dahl told the Business Journal.

Brokers Dan Chhan, Tim McKay, Sam Wayne and Matt Kemper of Cushman & Wakefield represented the buyers, while Andrew Shultz and Brandon Burmeister of Cushman & Wakefield represented the seller.

Local office-to-residential conversions have been scant,  according to the Business Times.

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Seattle-based Unico Properties tried to convert the Colman Building on the edge of Seattle’s Pioneer Square from office to apartments, but those plans fell through.

In 2020, Unico and Pinnacle Partners converted the 18-story Washington Building in Tacoma from offices into 156 apartments.

In 2008, Unico converted the Cobb Building in Downtown Seattle from medical-dental offices into 91 luxury apartments.

— Dana Bartholomew