Portland’s Towne Storage building has earned a record price on a per-square-foot basis.

The building traded for $62.75 million, according to Multnomah County records. The sale was recorded April 23.

The sale equated to $630 per square foot for the approximately 100,000-square-foot building, beating the previous record for Portland office space of $565 per square foot for Pearl West, according to Jones Lang LaSalle research.

CBRE Global Investors purchased the building from an entity of Westport Capital Partners. NKF Capital Markets represented Westport, while CBRE represented itself.

The high price reflects the strength of the tenant, said Patricia Raicht, senior vice president for research at JLL. The building is fully leased by Autodesk, a software maker for architecture and engineering, construction and entertainment applications. The company moved into the building, near the Burnside Bridge’s east end, from Lake Oswego.

“They have a credit tenant with an 11-year lease in there,” Raicht said.

Investors have been willing to pay a premium for buildings with long-term tenants. The Wieden + Kennedy building sold for $103.25 million, or $556 per square foot, last year to an institutional buyer.

The sale also shows bustling office demand in the Central Eastside industrial District. Developers are rushing in with projects such as Platform by Project^. That proposal calls for new construction of 140,000 square feet of office space.

The Towne Storage building originally opened in 1916 and was once home to a wholesale paper distributor. LRS Architects designed an adaptive reuse project to update the unreinforced masonry building, and Bremik Construction served as the general contractor. Sentinel Development was the developer.

Fortis Construction performed the tenant improvements for Autodesk, with design by Mackenzie.

Editor’s Note: This article has been corrected from an earlier version that misstated the price per square foot.

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An 11-story office tower in downtown Portland has sold for $68 million.

The 400 Sixth Avenue tower, a 208,477-square-foot office property, was purchased by a joint venture of SteelWave and Barings Real Estate Advisers on behalf of an institutional investor.

The seller was Portland-based Felton Properties. It was represented by NKF Capital Markets Vice Chairman Nick Kucha and Director James Childress.

The transaction equates to $326 per square foot.

The buyer plans to make improvements and reposition the building as a creative-office property.

“We have been evaluating the Portland market for two years and are excited to make our entry into Portland, in this cycle, by acquiring an asset with such great potential,” Peter Llorente, SteelWave’s managing director of acquisitions and development, stated in a news release. “With our partner, Barings, we have significant improvement plans for this asset.”

The property was built in 1961. It previously sold for $30.25 million in 2004, according to Multnomah County records.

The transaction is the first for the newly created NKF Pacific Northwest Capital Markets office in Portland.

“This property sale is testimony to a market that is continuing to show strength and growth,” Childress stated. “Institutional real-estate capital views the fundamentals of Portland with optimism and wants to be here. We expect to see continued upward pricing momentum as outside groups look to plant a flag in Portland’s office market as tenants and as buyers.”

The property has 17-foot floor heights, 10-foot window lines and views of Mount Hood. The building is located along bus and light-rail lines in downtown Portland. On the ground floor is a vacant retail space formerly occupied by Camera World.

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