NEW ORLEANS – As of Friday, March 27, One Canal Place — the 32-story, Class A office tower located at 365 Canal St. — has a new owner.
For more than 30 years, One Canal Place has been owned by OCP Office Owner, LLC, a partnership formed by New York-based Loeb Partners Realty, LLC, and New York-based real estate lender Aetna.
“Aetna has been involved with the property since they foreclosed on it in 1991 and Loeb Partners got involved in the mid-1990s — Loeb was actually the owners of Place St. Charles before the current owners,” explained Michael J. Siegel, SIOR, president and director of office leasing with Corporate Realty, which has providing property management and leasing services for One Canal Place since 1991 and will continue to do so under the new ownership.
The new ownership is One Canal Place Leasing, LLC, a limited liability corporation formed by the buyer Skysoar Capital Partners, a 10-year-old commercial real estate finance, equity and advisory firm out of Israel.
Siegel said the sale is not surprising.
“Ownership of a single asset for three-plus decades is unusual in commercial real estate,” he noted. “It’s just a case of things having run their course. The owner was just ready to take some chips off the table and move on to the next investment.
Completed in 1979, One Canal Place encompasses 630,581 rentable square feet (rsf) of Class A office space. It is part of a mixed-use complex that includes The Shops at Canal Place, The Westin New Orleans Hotel and a 1,650-space parking garage. One Canal Place occupies a central location steps from the Mississippi River and within blocks of the New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, the French Quarter, Canal Street shops, the ferry terminal, premier hotels and casinos, Audubon Aquarium and key downtown offices and courts.
The office tower is home to a varied tenant roster including Phelps Dunbar, LLP; The New Orleans Passport Center; Schouest, Bamdas, Soshea & BenMaier, PLLC; Foley & Judell, LLP; Salley, Hite, Mercer & Resor, LLC; and La Petite Theater, which recently relocated its administration offices to the building. Additionally, very recently, law firm Baker Donelson, one of the largest and most prominent law firms in New Orleans, signed a lease to occupy the top two floors of the building (just over 40,000 rsf).
Siegel noted that he expects the ownership transition to be smooth.
“We’ll still have the same management team, the same leasing team, the same engineers,” he said, He added that over the decades, the One Canal Place’s owners completed multiple renovations, something he hopes will continue under the new ownership.
Noting that this sale is one of multiple office buildings that have been changed ownership over the past year, Siegel said New Orleans’ commercial market is “still not easy, but there is some optimism right now and this sale is a part of that. This is riding that wave.”
