This article originally appeared in the April 2024 issue of BID Magazine. For more updates and insights on the Phoenix CRE market, download your free digital copy here.
Eric Wichterman understands office transactions. Over the course of his 29 years in commercial real estate, he has sold over 595 office buildings, totaling nearly $5B in consideration. He specializes in middle-market properties, with extensive experience in bringing private capital buyers into the fold to compete with the more accessible, mainstream buyer pool. Today, he serves as Vice Chairman at Cushman & Wakefield.
The iconic Bank of America building at 3030 N Central Ave in Phoenix Arizona, a Class A Office Property, was initially listed and positioned as a value-add office play or a multifamily redevelopment.
Though the property had previously been in escrow, the buyer had walked, leaving the seller still in search of a transaction. The seller chose to bring the property to Ten-X—a team that also had extensive collaboration experience with Eric Wichterman.
With 22 auction sales on Ten-X totaling over 2.5 million square feet, Wichterman has long embraced online auctions.
“I’d steadily worked with Ten-X over the years, and had just sold another property across the street from this one two years ago,” said Wichterman, citing the certainty of close as a major advantage of this transaction method. “I’ve never had a bad experience in 22 sales. They’ve all been fantastic events.”
Wichterman also finds the competitive spirit of auctions to be an advantage. “Despite stringent qualification and bidding approval hurdles, upfront due diligence, and large nonrefundable earnest money deposits, the process has an uncanny ability to create competition—highly qualified competition.”
The competition for Bank of America building was indeed fierce, attracting 27 registered bidders and accumulating 52 bids.
The combination of Ten-X’s extensive, curated asset marketing and the well-known skill of Wichterman and his team created deep investor interest for this property, which was marketed and sold for $11.6M in less than 100 days.
Read more about Wichterman and his work in our Auction eXperts profile.