REIT Buys Phoenix Data Center Leased to American Express

Griffin Capital, a publicly registered non-traded real estate investment trust, has acquired a Phoenix data center and office building for $91.5 million. The property is fully occupied by a single tenant: American Express Travel Related Services Company, a subsidiary of American Express.

Griffin and its Essential Asset REIT II (the first REIT offering is now closed) likes fully leased properties, including data centers, offices and healthcare assets. Fully leased buildings provide ongoing revenue and relatively little investment. About 70 percent of Griffin Capital's acquired assets are fully-leased.

Last year, Griffin acquired 80 percent of a Digital Realty data center in Ashburn, Virginia. In 2012 it acquired a three-building 155,000 square foot office and data center campus fully leased AT&T Wireless. It bought a Verizon data center in New Jersey in 2013. All three properties were fully leased at the time of purchase.

The Phoenix data center is 300,000 square feet across three stories and the office building is over 200,000 square feet. The property sits on a 28-acre site and is part of the American Express Beardsley Campus, developed as a build-to-suit for the tenant in the 1980s.

"We are pleased to acquire this critical operating asset, whereby the tenant has continued to demonstrate a meaningful financial commitment over several decades," said Louis Sohn, Griffin Capital's director of Acquisitions in a release.

Institutional real estate investment manager American Realty Advisors sold the property on behalf of a client.

In related news, Carter Validus also recently made the first data center acquisition in its REIT II offering, acquiring Online Tech’s Indianapolis data center for $7.5 million. The facility is 43,000 square feet supported by 3 megawatts.

Online Tech, which acquired the data center just last year, meets at a perfect crossroads with Carter Validus and other similar REITS; it’s a data center provider that has a strong focus in the healthcare vertical, like a mission critical Russian nesting doll.