Oakstop, an Oakland-based coworking and event space company, has purchased its downtown headquarters office building for $8 million.
The nine-year-old flexible space provider bought the 25,000-square-foot building at 1721 Broadway in one of the city’s few office deals this year, San Francisco Business Times reports. The sellers are Kwon Yangja and Poustinchian Mohamad.
The deal was priced at $320 per square foot.
The purchase of the three-story historic Art Deco building at 17th Street and Broadway was made in partnership with the San Francisco-based Community Arts Stabilization Trust, which invested $2.5 million. Oakstop received a loan from San Francisco-based Community Vision.
To date, Oakstop’s commercial real estate footprint includes 80,000 square feet Co-working and event space in six East Bay locations, five of which make up a veritable campus in downtown Oakland.
Oakstop started in 2014 as a 4,000-square-foot tenant at 1721 Broadway and gradually expanded to occupy the entire building over the last year.
The company offers jobs, events, and gallery space to entrepreneurs with a particular focus on communities of color.
“We have always viewed space as a resource for the entire community, with a particular focus on prioritizing the needs of the Black community,” Oakstop CEO Trevor Parham said in a statement. “Black-Owned Real Estate Represents a greater resource and catalyzes greater possibilities to create long-term social and economic impact for entire communities.”
Parham told The Business Times that Oakstop’s flexible office model could replace the traditional model of investors buying an office building, signing anchor tenants and then collecting rent.
Oakstop’s occupancy rate was 100 percent before the pandemic, and now it’s 90 percent, with little “hard marketing,” he said.
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Meanwhile, more than a third of offices in the city’s Center Core are empty, according to Cushman & Wakefield, with a vacancy rate of 34.1% in the first quarter.
This month, Texas-based Regus and Offers flexible workspace over three floors The historic Tribune Building in downtown Auckland.
— Dana Bartholomew
