W.P. Carey Spin Off Lists Google-Leased Binoculars Building in Venice Beach For Sale

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The owner of the eye-catching Binoculars Building in Venice Beach will use the spectacles to find an investor to take the Frank Gehry-designed office property off its hands. 

Net Lease Office Properties, a spin off of real estate investment trust W.P. Carey, is listing the themed building — named for the 44-foot-tall binoculars in front of the 78,578-square-foot property’s entrance — for sale via brokers CBRE (CBRE), according to The Real Deal. Tech giant Google has occupied the building since 2011. 

An asking price for the property, at 340 Main Street and known as Google Venice 1, was not immediately available. It doesn’t appear as though the tech giant has plans to vacate the property, as its lease there isn’t up for renewal until 2030, per TRD. CBRE’s Todd Tydlaska, Sean Sullivan, Michael Longo, Melissa Moock and Grant Goldman are marketing the building for sale.

“This listing is a good example of what capital wants in the market right now, great locations, high-profile assets with credit tenants at attractive price bases,” Tydlaska told Commercial Observer in an emailed statement. “We have received very strong initial interest from the market and anticipate a competitive process.”

The spectacles are an art installation by late sculptors Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen titled, fittingly, “Giant Binoculars.” W.P. Carey acquired the property for $18.3 million in 1995 after it was built for  advertising firm TBWA/Chiat/Day four years earlier. Yet the REIT in late 2023 announced that it would spin off its 59 office assets into Net Lease Office Properties, a separate REIT, with the Binoculars Building and others set for potential reappraisal or sale, per TRD.

Aside from the Binoculars Building, Google also rents space in “Silicon Beach,” a section of L.A.’s Westside that houses hundreds of tech companies a la the San Francisco Bay Area’s Silicon Valley. That includes its “Spruce Goose” property, a 450,000-square-foot Howard Hughes hangar that was converted for the tech giant in 2018, as well as a nearly 53,000-square-foot office in The Bluffs corporate park that it leased in 2022. 

W.P. Carey isn’t the only landlord trading in Google’s office space lately, however. A joint venture between Strategic Value Partners and Lincoln Property Group in October paid $187.5 million to Edward J. Minskoff Properties for The Bluffs. 

It also includes UCLA’s $700 million deal at the beginning of last year for Westside Pavilion, a former mall on Pico Boulevard on L.A.’s Westside that was previously set to a 500,000-square-foot trophy office redevelopment for the tech giant. Google had inked a 14-year pre-lease for the property in 2019, but by early 2023 Google’s parent company Alphabet had announced a plan to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in “exit costs” to cut leases across the country in the wake of the pandemic, and the company ditched the Pico Boulevard lease completely. 

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

Update: This story has been updated to reflect the Binoculars Building’s current ownership under Net Lease Office Properties, rather than W.P. Carey.