Riverside buys Austin's Lavaca Plaza; Unico paid $61.4M in 2015

Riverside has acquired Lavaca Plaza, the 11-story Austin office building at 504 Lavaca St. with 122,042 square feet, for an unspecified price from Unico Properties, which paid $61.4 million for the property in 2015, according to Connect CRE, which also relays Commercial Search's report. That $61.4 million remains the only dollar amount attached to Lavaca Plaza in the coverage.

When this publication first reported the sale on October 1, the buyer was known and the seller was not, no price had printed, and the building was described by its 122,042 square feet and seven floors of parking rather than by its counterparties; Connect CRE's account now supplies the missing side of the trade and confirms the buyer as a private equity investor.

Unico's 2015 basis works out to roughly $503 a square foot across the whole building, a mark set at a different point in Austin's cycle than the one a seller faces now, and the 2026 price remains unreported while JLL's marketing material suggests why: Lavaca Plaza runs a 46.2 percent vacancy. JLL's Capital Markets Investment Sales Advisory team on the seller side, Ryan Stevens and Drew Fuller, prepared marketing that suggested the property might be a candidate for a redevelopment play.

Completed in 1981, the building gives seven of its 11 floors to 476 parking spaces and leaves the top four stories as office in a mix of suite sizes, with an on-site café, conference rooms, showers and a bike locker, and short hops to the 2nd Street District, the 6th Street Entertainment District and Lady Bird Lake. A property that is majority parking by floor count, 46.2 percent vacant, and still carrying a 2015 basis near $500 a square foot is a redevelopment candidate on the arithmetic, though the coverage does not say what a rebuild would involve.

The trade sits on the line that has been dividing office values—trophy buildings finding comps, commodity buildings repricing tenant by tenant, with the adjustment landing lease by lease rather than all at once—and Austin's tape offers little help in reading it: in late September a renovated 267,956-square-foot Class A tower changed hands in the city with no price disclosed, and downtown's repricing was left waiting on numbers that would not print.

Unico is exiting a 1981 vintage asset eleven years after buying it, and Riverside is taking on a building its own broker flagged for redevelopment. If a 2026 price surfaces, it will show how far Austin office has traveled in that time; the next number worth watching at 504 Lavaca is either a recorded sale price or the cost of the rebuild the marketing material hinted at.