250 Tower, the 16-story glass office building on the east side of the broader Central Business District is up for sale.
CBRE’s National Office Partners team in Salt Lake City is marketing the building to investors as a value-add play. Brokers Phil Brierley, Cole Macadaeg and Charley Will are leading the sale, according to a LinkedIn post from Brierley. No asking price was listed.
The 374,772-square-foot tower at 250 E. 200 S. was built in 1984 and was once known as the CenturyLink building. CBRE markets it as a Class A, LEED Gold building. A 2017 renovation added an auditorium conference center, a second-floor outdoor terrace and a fitness and yoga center.
A five-story, 461-stall garage and 31 surface stalls give it 1.31 parking spaces per 1,000 square feet. Unico Properties lists the tower as the only remaining Utah property in its portfolio after it scaled back in recent years.
The Seattle-based firm owned the data center building directly across the street from 250 Tower before selling it to Dart Interests in 2023. It also previously owned the Boston Building and sold the City Centre building to the University of Utah in 2023.
Unico signed the University of Utah as a tenant at 250 Tower while it was buying the building, filling much of the space the seller was vacating, according to a case study on Unico’s website. The U. has anchored the tower since 2017 and renewed its lease in 2022, according to CBRE.
The U. occupies 38% of the building’s leased space, and 200 South connects the tower to its main campus. When it renewed in 2022, the university shrank its footprint and staggered its lease expirations, according to CBRE. The brokers say the U.’s three-day-a-week return-to-office mandate, which took effect in August, is already driving new demand for space. Forvis Mazars, Reaveley Engineers and Stride Bank have also renewed or signed leases since 2021.
The remaining leases run an average of 4.6 years. But the building also has 108,638 square feet of vacant space spread across contiguous full floors, which CBRE is pitching as the upside for a buyer willing to lease it up.
250 Tower facing Downtown Salt Lake City to the west. Image from CBRE.
That vacancy is the core of CBRE’s pitch. The brokers say no other block larger than 50,000 square feet is available Downtown, which would make 250 Tower one of the few options for a big tenant looking to move into the urban core.
They also say a buyer would get in at a stabilized, all-in cost more than 70% below what it would take to build a comparable tower today.
The listing leans on Downtown’s lack of new supply. No new office building has been delivered Downtown since 2022, nothing is under construction, and no new supply is expected to deliver within five years, according to CBRE. The brokers say Class A leasing from 2021 through 2025 ran more than 1.4 times the 2018-2019 average, with eight quarters of positive absorption. Competing buildings average 83.5% occupancy.
They also point to the residential growth around the building: seven Type I projects have added more than 1,500 apartments within four blocks of the tower over the past five years. The rebuild of 200 South as a bus rapid transit corridor has improved access, they say.
CBRE’s offering memorandum also says the CenturyLink Switching Center, which appears to be the former Mountain Bell data center across the street at 205 E. 200 S., is slated for demolition in 2027 to make way for an upper-upscale, full-service hotel. Unico sold that building to Dart Interests in 2023. BSL is not aware of any public proposal for a hotel on the site.
The sale lines up with what Brierley told the industry last month. At ULI Utah’s Trends conference on Oct. 20, he argued the office market is more split than its averages suggest. Overall vacancy was 21.8% in CBRE’s third-quarter report, but prime vacancy near Downtown was 6.5%. Class B vacancy sat at 27.3%.
Class A asking rents in the central business district hit a record $40.08 per square foot, up 10.9% from a year earlier. CBRE counted no office projects under construction, compared with about 2.9 million square feet across 16 projects at the 2020 peak.
Brierley said big contiguous blocks were already scarce in the top buildings. He expected tenants to be stuck renewing in place or moving into existing space, pushing demand to the next tier of buildings. That’s the gap 250 Tower is being pitched to fill.
It’s a sharp turn from early 2024, when BSL reported that the regional office market had posted nearly 1 million square feet of negative absorption in 2023.
250 Tower facing the Wasatch Mountains in Salt Lake City to the east. Image from CBRE.
