INDEPENDENCE, Ohio -- A New York buyer has snapped up six suburban office buildings in a $20 million deal that wraps up Duke Realty Corp.'s slow departure from Northeast Ohio.
Affiliates of Time Equities, Inc., a real estate firm based in New York, bought the office portfolio from Duke on Friday, according to public records. The sale included the Oak Tree Place and Freedom Square I, II and III buildings in Independence; the Rock Run North and Rock Run Center buildings in Seven Hills; and vacant land on Oak Tree Boulevard.
Duke, a publicly traded real estate investment trust based in Indianapolis, has been trying to sell its Northeast Ohio properties for a decade. Stymied by the recession and slow recovery, the company has taken years to shed more than a dozen other buildings here, as part of a broader effort to pare its office holdings in the Midwest.
The Rockside corridor properties, which comprise more than 420,000 square feet, were lingering remnants of Duke's once-formidable local presence. A company spokeswoman declined to comment on the recent sales.
"We do not discuss transactions until we've had a chance to talk to our investors about it," Helen McCarthy, the spokeswoman, said.
Tom Fox of the JLL brokerage, which represented Duke, said the buildings are 67 percent occupied -- up from just 46 percent in mid-2012, when his office took over leasing and management. JLL put the portfolio on the market in September, once the occupancy level looked attractive enough for a buyer to bite.
"There's a value-add," said Fox, a senior vice president in JLL's Cleveland office. "[Time Equities will] probably want to do some renovations, and then they'll be aggressive to lease up the remaining vacancy."
Time Equities executives could not be reached for comment Thursday.
According to its website, Time Equities isn't new to the Cleveland area. Company affiliates own a 1970s office building on Enterprise Parkway in Twinsburg and a parking garage on Belle Avenue in Lakewood. The company buys, sells, develops and redevelops commercial and industrial buildings across the United States, Canada and Germany.