Ford Motor Credit's suburban Tampa office building sells at a loss
By Ashley Gurbal Kritzer
Tampa Bay Business Journal
Published: Dec 21, 2023

A publicly traded real estate investment trust has sold an office building in the Tampa suburbs for $22 million — a figure the REIT says represents a $700,000 loss.

CTO Realty Growth Inc., based in Winter Park, has sold the four-story, 120,500-square-foot building known as Sabal Pavilion at 3620 Queen Palm Drive. CBRE arranged the sale and said the buyer is a private, Virginia-based real estate investment firm. A deed for the transaction has not been filed in Hillsborough County.

Ford Motor Credit LLC has occupied the entire building since 2000, CBRE said. Tampa unicorn startup Cirkul Inc., known for its Tiktok-famous water bottles, recently subleased 91,401 square feet through the remainder of Ford Motor Credit's term.

“We’ve made good progress with asset sales over the past few months, and with this most recent office sale, we’ve now accretively sold nearly all of our legacy office exposure,” John P. Albright, president and CEO of CTO, said in a statement.

A team of brokers from CBRE's capital markets group — Dale Peterson, Joe Chick, Courtney Snell and Nick Sharpe — represented CTO in the sale.

“This Class A asset was well-maintained by Ford Motor Credit and the current ownership," Peterson, a CBRE senior vice president, said in a statement. "The property’s mission-critical location and above-market parking ratio drove interest from a diverse set of corporate owners/users and investors."

CTO paid $26.9 million for the property in 2020, according to Hillsborough County property records. Before that transaction, the property sold for $21.5 million in 2016.

CTO said Wednesday that it provided a "$15.4 million first mortgage to the buyer at a fixed interest rate of 7.5%, with a term of 179 days."