Glenfield Launches Fund To Buy Suburban Office, Starting In Alabama
An Atlanta investment firm has launched a $150M fund to buy suburban office buildings, despite uncertainties about the fate of office and the work-from-home movement.
Glenfield Capital launched its Glenfield Stabilized Income equity fund in October with a portfolio of more than 1M SF of office buildings Glenfield recently acquired, which are 96% leased for an average term of nine years.
“We are bullish on the investment case for high-quality office assets in desirable markets,” Glenfield Capital Managing Principal James Cate said. “We are confident that the noise and uncertainty about the future of in-person work are overstated and temporary.”
Cate said at a Bisnow event in September that the firm was raising money for acquisitions that would be contrarian, revealing that Glenfield purchased One Federal Place in Birmingham, Alabama, this past summer for $67M.
Glenfield rolled that purchase into the fund, as well as two other properties: the three-building Timberlake Corporate Center in St. Louis and Gramercy Woods, a 421K SF building in Jacksonville with CVS Health and SS&C as primary tenants.
The firm is scouting Southeast and Midwest suburban markets for other stabilized office assets, Cate said in a release.
“A $70M office building in Birmingham? That's like buying King Kong. You shouldn't do that, should you?" Cate told Bisnow in September. "If you would have asked me eight to 10 months ago would we have had difficultly financing that? I would have said, 'Absolutely.' It's Birmingham, it's office, and part of what we're doing is being partly contrarian."
