Capital Group Buying Downtown's Distressed Bank Of America Plaza
A major tenant at a distressed Downtown LA office tower will be its next owner.
Investment firm Capital Group is buying the Bank of America Plaza at 333 S. Hope St. The seller was a Brookfield Properties entity that defaulted on a $400M CMBS loan secured by the property last year and put it up for sale shortly after.
Capital Group plans to consolidate its LA operations at the office tower, which will eventually be home to more than 2,100 employees, the firm said in a statement. The company manages $3.4T in assets globally.
Capital Group has been a tenant of the tower since 1978, according to a representative for the firm. It was one of the first tenants at the tower, then called Security Pacific Plaza, the Los Angeles Times previously reported. It leases about 320K SF at the 1.4M SF property, and its last 15-year renewal was set to expire in 2030.
It is the largest tenant in the building, though Bank of America still occupies space there. Capital Group didn't provide additional information about existing tenants or its future at the building.
“We knew the best landlord we could possibly have would be ourselves,” Capital Group CEO Mike Gitlin told Bloomberg. “The best way to ensure a great environment in downtown LA is to create what we’re calling a vertical campus.”
Capital Group announced its agreement to purchase the tower but did not disclose a sale price. The 55-story building last appraised for $212.5M in late 2024, according to The Real Deal. It had been valued at $605M 10 years prior.
A source familiar with the deal told Commercial Observer the building traded hands for about $150 per SF, which, for the roughly 1.4M SF building, would work out to approximately $210M. Brookfield declined to comment on the sale.
Last summer, another distressed Brookfield property in Downtown sold to Uncommon Developers for $210M, or about $201 per SF.
