A rendering of the Mark 302 at 302 Colorado Street in Santa Monica, with Seritage CEO Benjamin Schall (Credit: Neoscape, Seritage Growth Properties)
Seritage Growth Properties is partnering with Invesco Real Estate as it converts the former Sears department store in Downtown Santa Monica into a creative office space.
A New York-based real estate investment trust, Seritage sold half its stake in the 100,000-square-foot building, entering into a joint venture with Atlanta-based Invesco, a real estate investment firm. Invesco paid $50 million, the two companies said in a statement announcing the deal on Thursday.
Seritage will use part of the proceeds to pay off the mortgage on the property, which is valued at $145 million. The rest will go toward the $50 million planned conversion.
The landmarked Art Deco department, at 302 Colorado Avenue, will reopen as a four-story mixed-use creative office space called the Mark 302.
It will include a beer garden and a rooftop garden and leisure space meant to appeal to tenants looking to get in on the burgeoning tech scene in Santa Monica. It sits a few blocks from the Santa Monica Pier, across Colorado Avenue from the high-end Santa Monica Place shopping mall, and a block from the last stop on the Metro Expo Line.
Seritage calls the conversion the “first phase of the redevelopment of the site,” and hinted at a future development on parking lot space there.
The Sears store opened there in 1947 and was landmarked in 2004. Seritage first proposed a redevelopment in 2016. The store shuttered a year ago.
Seritage controls 224 wholly-owned Sears and Kmart stores and 31 stores as joint ventures with firms including General Growth Properties, Simon Property Group, and Macerich.
New York-based Invesco is no stranger to Santa Monica, nor the tech industry. In November 2016, it sold an office building at 2700 Colorado Avenue for $368 million to Larry Ellison’s Oracle company, which penciled out to $1,165 per square foot, making it the most expensive office deal in the city at the time.
That same year it inked a deal with Google for a portion of its Hercules campus in nearby Playa Vista, including the “Spruce Goose Hangar” where Howard Hughes built his gigantic wooden airplane in the 1940s.
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