Canadian real estate giant Brookfield Canada Office Properties announced March 24 that it has closed a deal to sell its Royal Centre office tower, at the corner of Burrard and West Georgia streets, for $285 million in net proceeds.
The assessed price for the 589,000-square-foot, 37-storey office tower, which also has 91,000 square feet of retail space, was $287.5 million. The company did not reveal the actual sale price.
Connected with this sale, the company (TSX:BOX.UN) announced that it will pay a distribution of $1.60 per unit on April 19 to those who hold units on April 5.
Brookfield did not reveal the purchaser although rumours had been that German billionaire Klaus-Michael Kuehne was interested in buying the tower last year.
Avison Young told Business in Vancouver in January that the expected sale of the Royal Centre property at 1055 West Georgia Street, combined with the expected sale of the Bentall Centre office portfolio would “push overall [Vancouver commercial real estate] dollar volume to previously unseen levels.”
“Both assets will very likely set new benchmarks and may produce the first billion-dollar-plus commercial real estate transactions in Vancouver’s history,” Avison Young said in a recent 2016 forecast.
The current record price for a Canadian office tower is the $1.27 billion paid for Toronto’s 68-storey Bank of Nova Scotia tower in 2012.
with files from Frank O’Brien
