Hackman exits Rivian NNN building at $480 a foot

At $480 a foot, the sale of 401 Coral Circle is more a bet on Rivian's lease than on the South Bay office market. Newmark arranged the $27.25 million sale of the 56,815-square-foot R&D building in El Segundo, California, which is fully leased on a triple-net basis to Rivian; Majestic Realty is the buyer, according to Connect CRE. Newmark represented seller Hackman Capital Partners with a team that included Kevin Shannon, Rob Hannan, Ken White, Laura Stumm, Michael Moll, Ryan Plummer, Andrew Briner and Aaron Banks.

That price is a 78% gain over the $15.3 million Hackman paid in 2018. Hackman repositioned the 1967 building, renovated in 2020, and leased it first to Boeing and later to Rivian, which uses the site as a customer-facing service center and a secure R&D facility supporting its consumer and commercial vehicle lines.

The eight-year hold is the redevelopment trade working as intended: buy an aging shell, spend on renovation, sign a triple-net lease, and sell at a price that reflects the rent roll more than the local office market. The 78% gain is the payout for carrying a 1967 building through a renovation and two tenant transitions. For Majestic, the purchase is a 100% leased asset at $480 a foot, a number that would be hard to justify for a conventional suburban office building but makes sense when the buyer is effectively underwriting Rivian's lease obligations with the building as collateral.

The sale also gives the South Bay a fresh comp: a building that combines a customer-facing service center and secure R&D space is more specialized than a generic office box, which helps explain the per-foot price. Brokers are likely to cite 401 Coral Circle at $480 a foot in the next net-lease R&D assignment, and the trade is a useful reminder that the value came from repositioning and tenant selection rather than a rising tide in office demand. Connect CRE attributes the result to the strength and desirability of the South Bay market, but a fully leased triple-net asset in this niche can clear on terms that ignore the broader office stock's troubles.

For Newmark, the El Segundo sale adds to a busy month: in August the firm also announced a $277 million construction loan on a Jersey City tower. Neither mandate is a headline trophy trade; the market right now is being made by working assets like apartment construction loans and net-lease R&D buildings, not by the marquee office trades that dominated the last cycle. At $27.25 million, this deal sits below the trades that capture headlines, but it reveals where pricing actually stands in the South Bay.