Blackstone Mortgage Trust wins DC office portfolio at bargain price – Commercial Observer

Another collection of Washington, D.C., office buildings has been sold at a foreclosure auction, and the buyer is a familiar face.

Blackstone Mortgage Trust (BXMT), the former lender of the four-property portfolio and the sole bidder in Wednesday’s auction, paid $83.7 million for the collection at district headquarters. L’Enfant Plaza — well below its most recent appraisal value of $365.6 million, according to the Business newspapers.

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The buildings, at 470 L’Enfant Plaza SW, 490 L’Enfant Plaza SW, 955 L’Enfant Plaza SW And 429 L’Enfant Plaza SWwere written off by the previous owner JBG Smith (JBGS) at the beginning of last year And ready to be auctioned last month. The portfolio had an outstanding balance of approximately $238 million at the time of the foreclosure notice.

A representative for BXMT declined to comment.

Lenders acquiring buildings from their borrowers is an all-too-common trend in Washington DC, with the BXMT purchase being just the latest example.

Business banking BDT and MSD partners in August, for example, paid a bargain $100 million for the former Trump International Hotelnow a Waldorf Astoria property, on Pennsylvania Avenue past the previous owner CGI merchant group defaulted on a $285 million property-related note the bank issued in 2022.

Meanwhile, in June, State Farm Life Insurance paid just $17.6 million for a 123,000 square foot office a few blocks from the White Housenamed after the former owners Office Building Income Trust And AEW defaults on a loan from State Farm. The building was last sold in 2010 for $65 million. The same month, a non-profit science advocacy organization Society for Science paid 10 million dollars at auction For 1776 Massachusetts Avenue NW, less than a quarter of what the previous owner VLE Associates I paid it in 2012.

Nick Trombola can be contacted at [email protected].