As market heats up, Sacramento developer buys another office building

A Sacramento development firm has bought two office buildings worth $12.6 million in a three-day mini-spree. The deals provide further evidence that the area’s commercial real estate market is continuing to firm up.

Ingemanson Enterprises on Monday purchased a fully leased office building on Heritage Lane, across from Arden Fair mall in the Point West district. The purchase price was just under $7 million, said Ingemanson’s broker, Tyler Boyd of Voit Real Estate Services.

In an email, Boyd said Ingemanson “saw this as an investment opportunity to purchase a centrally located, multitenant Point West office building that is stabilized with a good mixture of national, regional and local tenants.” The 56,000-square-foot building was built in 1977 and renovated three years ago.

Ingemanson’s president, Dean Ingemanson, couldn’t be reached for comment.

The deal came three days after Ingemanson spent $5.6 million for an office building on Roseville’s Douglas Boulevard, one of the busiest commercial strips in the region.

Ingemanson’s acquisitions come as the office market gains strength following several years of painfully sluggish recovery. The rejuvenation of the central city has become well-known because of the market activity surrounding construction of the new Sacramento Kings arena at Downtown Plaza, but market researcher Garrick Brown said much of the growth in occupancy has taken place well outside the downtown area.

“There’s a lot of interest, there’s a lot more investors circling downtown because of the arena,” said Brown, who follows the Sacramento commercial market for real estate firm DTZ. But, he said, “The big story really has been suburban growth.”

Overall office vacancies in the region have fallen to around 14 percent from about 18 percent five years ago.

In the Roseville area, however, which became grossly overbuilt during the housing bubble, Brown said vacancies have dropped by half, to 15.8 percent. The Point West area, where Ingemanson made its latest purchase, still has a vacancy rate of around 20 percent but has made progress.

Boyd said Ingemanson expects the Point West market “to improve significantly over the next five years with a tightening in vacancy and a steady rise in rental rates.”

The Point West building had been owned by a group called Heritage Lane Partners LLC. The seller was represented in the deal by Kevin Partington and Bruce Hohenhaus of Cushman & Wakefield.

The Ingemanson firm was founded in 1968 by the late Maryanne Ingemanson, a onetime concert pianist who decided to try her hand at real estate after moving to Sacramento. Her son, Dean, has run the company for the past several years.

This story was originally published January 12, 2015 at 11:26 AM with the headline "As market heats up, Sacramento developer buys another office building."