Call the buyer in this deal an involuntary nonprofit.
Call the nonprofit in this deal a bargain hunter.
And call the recent sale of a 40,000-square-foot office in Uptown Oakland an indicator that the East Bay hub is on par with San Francisco in terms of price cuts, albeit at a smaller scale.
Locally based Amarok Capital sold 401 Grand Avenue to the Felton Institute, a nonprofit social service provider for $6.8 million, the San Francisco Business Times reported. The price equates to $170 per square foot, slightly lower than the current range for larger properties in the Financial District of San Francisco, which has undergone a reset in the wake of the pandemic.
The price also points to a trim for Amarok, which paid $8.3 million for the building in 2016, and put more money into upgrading the property with renovated common areas.
The decline in value of 20 percent or so that Amtrak realized on the sale is a relatively moderate hit compared to other recent deals in Oakland. An office tower at 1700 Broadway that went for $13.3 million in 2017 sold earlier this year for $2.75 million, for example.
The plummeting prices come as office vacancies in Oakland’s Central Business District — which includes the city’s Downtown and Uptown district and hosts about 12 million square feet of space — notched a vacancy rate of 31.8 percent in the second quarter, up slightly from the prior period, according to CBRE data.