AXS Opportunity Fund acquires 20-story One North Central in Phoenix

AXS Opportunity Fund has acquired One North Central, the 20-story, 429,120-square-foot Class A office tower at 1 North Central Avenue in downtown Phoenix, with Newmark's Chris Marchildon, Barry Gabel and CJ Osbrink representing the seller, Parallel Capital Partners, which bought the building for $93 million in 2015. Connect CRE's account of the sale does not include a price.

That 2015 purchase is the only figure the trade has attached to it — spread across 429,120 square feet, it comes to roughly $217 a square foot. The building dates to 2001 and carries the conveniences a downtown tenant asks for: Valley Metro light rail access, a recently completed amenity center, structured and subterranean parking, and ground-floor retail, with government offices, educational institutions and entertainment venues within reach. The reporting carries no financing detail, either, so the buyer's leverage, and with it the equity check, stays out of the public record.

The terms setting office marks this year have been leases and loans rather than last sales, a pattern this publication has traced from Norfolk's 150 West Main trading at $111 a square foot to New York Life's $386 million against 200 Madison Avenue, where a tenant's lease and a lender's short clock set the mark. In that setting, a trade without a published price points the underwriting at the rent roll, and AXS has kept the leasing side in place to work it: Newmark's Brett Abramson, Chris Latvaaho and Chris Beall are retained as leasing advisors on the property.

Newmark's role runs end to end here — it carried the sale for Parallel and now holds the leasing assignment for the buyer. The brokerage has appeared in 59 stories spanning office debt placements as well as sales, and the Phoenix assignment puts its leasing desk on the same asset it just sold.

Marchildon framed the trade around capital flow rather than value: "As capital continues to return to the office sector, properties with strong fundamentals and irreplaceable downtown locations are attracting increased attention from buyers." That is an argument for the sector, and for a fund buying a tower on the broker's own claim that buyers are returning. Because no price was published, the deal never has to prove it.

Whether a price for the tower follows may matter less than the leases, given that twenty floors, 429,120 square feet and the leasing team of Abramson, Latvaaho and Beall came with the closing. The next marker on One North Central is likely to be a rent.