Geffen Sells Office Building for $33 Million

Entertainment mogul David Geffen on Thursday sold a plush Beverly Hills office building that once housed DreamWorks Records for $33 million to investors from New York and Dallas.

Geffen sold 331 N. Maple Drive to Praedium Group and Lincoln Property Co. for $412 per square foot, one of the highest prices paid in Beverly Hills in recent years.

MCA Inc. built the showplace three-story building for about $40 million in 2000, but Geffen and fellow investors acquired the property at a discount when MCA decided it needed more space for its record division, said real estate broker Bob Safai of Madison Partners, who represented the sellers.

DreamWorks has a long-term lease and still is paying rent on more than 70% of the 80,000-square-foot building, even though most of the entertainment company’s employees have moved out, said Chris Hughes, a principal at Praedium, a New York investment company that specializes in buying underperforming and undervalued real estate.

Praedium can raise the value of the Maple Drive building by renting the unleased space and helping DreamWorks buy out its lease or sublease its empty space, Hughes said.

Parent company DreamWorks SKG sold its record division last year.

The Beverly Hills office market has “always retained a certain cachet and level of value,” Safai said. Recent Beverly Hills sales include 9440 Santa Monica Blvd. for $280 per foot and 9777 Wilshire Blvd. for $276 per foot.

Praedium announced in March that it planned to invest as much as $500 million in Southern California real estate, primarily in the Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego counties.

“We think Southern California’s ongoing economic growth will present tremendous opportunities,” Hughes said. The company also bought the Rosemead Garden Apartments in Pico Rivera this week for $13 million.

Lincoln Property, Praedium’s partner in the Maple Drive purchase, is a Dallas-based real estate company that has acquired more than $130 million in commercial property in Los Angeles in the last three years and has 40 million square feet of real estate in the U.S.