A vacant One Franklin Plaza comes up for sale

CommonWealth REIT has put One Franklin Plaza in Center City up for sale.

The 24-story, 607,471-square-foot office building at 200 N. 16th St. used to house the headquarters of GlaxoSmithKline prior to its relocation to the Navy Yard.

Now vacant, it’s one of the few large, chunks of contiguous spaces available in the downtown office market. However, the way the property is being marketed, it could offer a investor an opportunity to move it beyond just office space and do a mixed-use redevelopment of the structure.

“The more we looked at the property, 600,000 square feet of one thing is too much,” said Mike Margolis, an investment broker with Newmark Grubb Knight Frank. “There aren’t 600,000-square-foot tenants. The way the building breaks, it works well for three different users. There are three elevator banks and three new lobbies could be built. Three different users could use the building at the same time.”

Margolis is marketing the property with colleagues David Dolan, Brett Segal, Wayne Fisher and Craig Scheuerle.

Among the combinations Margolis envisions for the property includes a mix of office, educational and even hotel in the building but it’s not limited to that.

One prospective investor considered it for student housing. The Philadelphia Housing Authority has toured the building and is considering it as an option to consolidate 300,000 square feet of its space. Rumors of Drexel University eyeing it to expand its Center City footprint have ebbed and flowed.

The building served as GlaxoSmithKline’s headquarters since 1980, which is when it was constructed. The site has the city’s most flexible and dense zoning, which allows office, mixed use, apartments, hotel, health care and educational uses.

Prices against other office buildings, the property could trade for roughly $80 a square foot, or roughly $50 million. Margolis plans to double the typical time to market the property to 12 weeks because of the unique play One Franklin presents.

“We’re already getting a good bit of interest,” he said.

Source: Philadelphia Business Journal