Two Cargill Corporate Buildings Sold For $123M

Real estate giant CBRE Group, Inc., announced Tuesday the sale of two buildings at the Excelsior Crossings campus, which house Cargill corporate employees, for $122.75 million.
 
The two seven-story buildings total more than 500,000 square feet and are located at 9350 and 9380 Excelsior Boulevard in Hopkins. The sale includes two of the three Excelsior Crossings buildings that house a large chunk of Cargill’s corporate employees.
 
Cargill, the largest private company in the country, leases 100 percent of the three buildings and has occupied them since they were built in 2008 and 2009. According to a Cargill spokesman, the three buildings house about 2,700 employees. The company also has about 1,700 employees at its corporate headquarters in Wayzata.
 
The buildings were sold to real estate investment and finance company Colony Financial, Inc., based in Santa Monica, California.
 
Los Angeles-based CBRE represented the seller Real Estate Capital Partners, on behalf of IVG Institutional Funds GmbH—a German investment firm that purchased the buildings from Minneapolis-based real estate developer Opus in 2007 and 2008.
 
CBRE announced in July that the buildings were up for sale. Cargill’s lease on the two sold buildings reportedly runs through 2020; however, its lease for the third building extends to 2023. Cargill itself sold the third building—which comprises about 250,000 square feet—in December 2011 to Houston-based Hines Global REIT for around $70 million, according to Hines’ annual report.
 
A CBRE representative could not be immediately reached to comment further on the sale.