Blackstone, LBA Realty to close $270M CMBS refinancing of One Culver

Blackstone and LBA Realty are set to close a $270 million CMBS refinancing of One Culver, the eight-story, 378,377-square-foot Culver City office building they have co-owned since 2022, with Nomura Holdings originating a loan that lands smaller than the $310 million of prior debt it retires. The proceeds also cover $5.8 million in closing costs, according to Commercial Search, which expects the venture to retain $248.1 million in equity at closing. A $270 million loan cannot both retire $310 million of debt and pay $5.8 million in closing costs; that takes $315.8 million, and the coverage does not say how the roughly $45.8 million difference is funded or what the retained-equity figure measures.

LBA has owned and remade the building for a decade and a half, acquiring the 1986-completed asset for $159 million in 2014, losing Sony—then the sole tenant—in 2016, and spending $45 million on a renovation and repositioning completed in 2018; One Culver reached full occupancy by June 2021. Blackstone came in through a 2022 recapitalization the coverage sizes at $500 million and holds a 90 percent stake, leaving LBA with the rest. Whether that $500 million was equity or total capitalization the coverage does not say, and it offers no current occupancy figure, rent roll or appraisal, so the loan-to-value a lender would want cannot be computed from what is here. The building sits near Apple's 536,000-square-foot office, the sort of adjacency a loan narrative can use, though the coverage does not identify One Culver's current tenants.

That the new loan is smaller than the balance it replaces is the part worth holding onto, because the office maturities this publication has covered recently resolved the other way: the $1.1 billion Hollywood Media Portfolio loan now runs to November 2027 with the coupon untouched and the balance whole, and BridgeInvest's $114 million Miami Beach refinancing left a private credit fund holding a stabilized takeout on a building that was 83-percent leased. A sponsor group writing debt off the balance sheet, assuming equity covers the rest of the gap, is choosing a paydown over an extension, which implies a lender willing to write new securitized paper on this asset at a size the collateral supports.

LBA's buying elsewhere frames the choice. In August the firm reported its $1.2 billion purchase of 10.5 million square feet of Southeast logistics from EQT, so the same sponsor refinancing an office asset in Culver City is simultaneously the buyer taking industrial rent-reset risk. On One Culver, the concrete thing to check is the settlement statement: whether the $310 million payoff and the $248.1 million equity figure hold once the loan funds and the closing costs clear.