TIAA Sells D.C. Office Near White House for Half Its Price From 2006

You know Washington, D.C.’s office market is in rough shape when a building just blocks away from the White House trades for less than its purchase price in the 1990s.

New York-based financial services firm Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association-College Retirement Equities Fund (TIAA), via its subsidiary Nuveen, has sold the 12-story building at 1401 H Street NW, in the District’s McPherson Square neighborhood, to an affiliate of Tourmaline Capital Partners for $118 million, according to property records. The Business Journals first reported the sale.

TIAA has attempted to sell the 1992-built building since mid-2022, via brokers Cushman & Wakefield (CWK). The price Tourmaline paid is barely half of the $205 million TIAA paid for the property in 2006, and it’s 11.2 percent less than the $133.1 million that previous owners George Comfort & Sons and Loeb Partners Realty of New York paid for it in 1998.

The building is about 85 percent leased, according to a leasing page on Cushman & Wakefield’s website. 

A spokesperson for Nuveen declined to comment. Representatives for TIAA and Tourmaline did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

TIAA is getting out of Dodge in D.C.’s doom loop of an office market, which has seen record high levels of vacancy and availability even before the Trump administration announced its plans to slash both owned and leased space across the District. In late December, the company sold its stake in four D.C. office properties to former joint venture partner Norges Bank, as part of an eight-property, $977 million deal. 

One of those properties, 800 17th Street NW, was picked up by TIAA and Norges Bank for $392 million in 2015 — a record for D.C. at the time, as it was the first time in history that an office building in the District had traded for over $1,000 per square foot.

Nick Trombola can be reached at ntrombola@commercialobserver.com.