Bentall Kennedy Prime Canadian Property Fund and undisclosed partners have spent slightly more than $400 million to buy the Bentall Five office tower at the corner of Burrard and Dunsmuir streets.
Bentall Kennedy said yesterday that the transaction involved the fund as well as other Canadian pension fund clients.
Bentall built the first 22 floors of Bentall Five in 2002 and added a second phase with 13 floors in 2007. It then managed the structure on behalf of client SITQ, a real-estate subsidiary of the Caisse de depot et placement du Quebec.
SITQ sold the building to Germany’s DekaBank GmbH in May 2009 for $297 million in what was one of the first large commercial real-estate assets to trade in North America following the late 2008 economic downturn.
Bentall Kennedy chief investment officer Paul Zemla told Business in Vancouver that SITQ, which is a Bentall client, was not one of the partners who purchased the building.
The 35-storey structure has 579,980 square feet of space, according to Wikipedia.
Soon after the May 2009 transaction, Business in Vancouver spoke with Mark Renzoni, whose Vancouver office of CB Richard Ellis brokered the deal.
“It was definitely a surprise to have a $297 million cash offer in the first quarter of 2009. There was urgency on both sides once the legitimacy of the deal was established,” he said at the time.
“It turned out to be the largest deal in a decade for any single asset in Vancouver and it was the largest single-asset deal in Canada for 2009.”
