Syngenta Seeds HQ Near Minneapolis Sold for $28.4 Million

Minneapolis / St. Paul Business Journal - August 17, 2009

Opus Northwest on Monday sold a newly built Minnetonka office building for about $30 million to CB Richard Ellis Realty Trust, a firm based in Princeton, N.J., according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

The 116,300-square-foot building, called Crest Ridge Corporate Center I, is leased to Syngenta Seeds Inc., a division of Basel, Switzerland-based Syngenta International. Syngenta's lease runs through June 2019.

CB Richard Ellis Realty Trust said in the filing that it bought the building, at 11055 Wayzata Blvd., for $28.4 million plus closing costs.

The building and its attached 430-stall parking ramp is at the southeast quadrant of Hopkins Crossroad and Interstate 394. Work was finished on the building in June.

Syngenta is moving about 250 workers into the building from various sites around the Twin Cities, including its former headquarters on Highway 55 in Golden Valley. It has about 500 workers in the state, according to a spokesman for Syngenta.

Opus Northwest is marketing Phase II of the corporate center on an as-yet undeveloped, similar-sized adjacent site.

Opus Northwest is a division of Opus Corp., also based in Minnetonka, which has had some of its other regional divisions around the country file for bankruptcy amid a national downturn in the market for commercial real estate.

The property was marketed for sale by Tom Holtz and Steven Buss from the Bloomington office of CB Richard Ellis.

This is the second notable purchase in the Twin Cities by CB Richard Ellis Realty Trust this summer. In July, it bought an industrial building in Rogers that is leased to Deerfield, Ill.-based Walgreen Co. for $15.34 million.

(Note: SEC Edgar prospectus supplement dated August 17, 2009 filed by CB Richard Ellis Realty Trust estimates that the acquisition cap rate for the Crest Ridge property was 8.7%.) Sphere: Related Content