California Capital Picks Up Office Building in Concord

California Capital & Investment Group has inked a deal to buy a 15-story office tower in Downtown Concord. The price was undisclosed.

The Pleasant Hill-based investor bought the 369,000-square-foot One Concord Center at 2300 Clayton Road, the San Francisco Business Times reported, citing unidentified sources. The seller was Utah-based Bridge Investment Group.

Bridge bought the office building in 2017 for $70.5 million, or $196 per square foot. It then sank $20 million into revamping its offices, according to a marketing brochure obtained by the Business Times.

Bridge may have offered the building, now 60 percent leased, for as little as $100 per square foot. If so, its deal with California Capital came to $39.6 million

The office building, among the tallest in Concord, is two blocks from the city’s BART station and has a deli, plus locker rooms and showers. It was “the focus” of Downtown Concord redevelopment when it broke ground in 1985, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Now it’s a casualty of a rough-and-tumble office market during the era of remote work. The office vacancy rate in the East Bay city in the first quarter was 17.4 percent, with little demand for office leases.

Atlanta-based Jamestown, which has struggled to sell a 300,000-square-foot empty office building at 2000 Clayton Street, is now pondering an office-to-vertical farming conversion.

California Capital spent three decades redeveloping properties in Downtown Oakland.

A year ago, it spent more than $90 million on a pair of office properties in Contra Costa County.

They include The Terraces, a 134,000-square-foot building in Pleasant Hill, where the formerly Oakland-based firm moved its headquarters. The purchase list also includes the Walnut Creek Executive Park, a 27-acre office campus in nearby Walnut Creek, which the city and California Capital view as ripe for redevelopment.

— Dana Bartholomew