Oakstop buys HQ building in Downtown Oakland for $8M

Oakstop, a coworking and events space firm based in Oakland, has purchased its headquarters office building in Downtown for $8 million.

The nine-year-old flexible space provider bought the 25,000-square-foot building at 1721 Broadway in one of the few office deals in the city this year, the San Francisco Business Times reported. The sellers were Kwon Yangja and Poustinchian Mohamad.

The deal works out to $320 per square foot.

The purchase of the three-story, historic Art Deco building at 17th Street and Broadway was done in tandem with the Community Arts Stabilization Trust, based in San Francisco, which invested $2.5 million. Oakstop received a loan from San Francisco-based Community Vision.

To date, Oakstop’s commercial real estate footprint includes 80,000 square feet of coworking and event space across six East Bay locations, five of which make up a veritable campus in Downtown Oakland.

Oakstop began as a 4,000-square-foot tenant at 1721 Broadway in 2014 and gradually expanded to take up the entire building last year.

The company provides work, event and gallery space to entrepreneurs with a particular focus on communities of color.

“We’ve always viewed the space as a resource for the whole community with a specific focus on prioritizing the needs of the Black community,” said Trevor Parham, CEO of Oakstop, in a statement. “Black-owned real estate represents an even greater resource and catalyzes even more possibilities for creating long-term social and economic impact for the whole community.”

Oakstop’s flexible office model could replace one employed by traditional investors who buy office buildings, sign anchor tenants and then collect rent, Parham told the Business Times.

Where Oakstop was at 100 percent occupancy before the pandemic, it’s 90 percent occupied now, he said, with little “hard marketing.” 

At the same time, more than one in three offices in the city’s Center Core were empty, according to Cushman & Wakefield, with a vacancy rate of 34.1 percent in the first quarter.

This month, Texas-based Regus inked a deal to provide flexible workspaces on three floors of the historic Tribune Tower in Downtown Oakland. 

— Dana Bartholomew