Columbia, Md.-based real estate investment trust Corporate Office Properties Trust (COPT) recently announced the sale of the only asset in its wholesale data center reporting segment: COPT’s DC-6 data center was sold to an affiliate company of CloudHQ, an investment vehicle managed by Cloud Capital. The property commanded a purchase price of $222.5 million.
According to the statement of sale, there was no debt attached to the asset, and COPT plans to reinvest the proceeds into funding its 1.8 million square feet of development projects.
“We are pleased to have worked with the COPT team on this transaction and are excited to add the DC-6 facility to the Cloud Capital portfolio,” said Hossein Fateh, CEO and founder of Cloud Capital. “Northern Virginia is the largest data center market in the world and continues to see high levels of tenant demand. Our highly skilled team, with a proven track record of successfully managing data center investments, will be looking to add value through various asset management initiatives in the short and medium term. In addition, we are actively looking at several interesting acquisition opportunities in the U.S. and internationally, which we are excited about.”
Located at 9651 Hornbaker Rd. in Manassas, Va., DC-6 was built in 2009 and is part of the Broad Run Industrial Park — a sizeable collection of distribution facilities and data centers located along Pacific Boulevard and Moran Road. DC-6 incorporates roughly 206,000 square feet of Manassas office space across two floors, and the facility sits on a 19.5-acre lot within the 1,500-acre Broad Run campus.
According to a COPT brochure, the property is LEED Gold-certified and offers superior reliability and security standards. Key security features include: 24/7/365, on-site security and continuous video surveillance; DoD Anti-Terrorism/Force Protection (ATFP) compliance; biometric access controls and man traps; as well as K-12 fences and guarded entrances.
COPT DC-6 is TIA 942 Tier III compliant in design and operation, and boasts reliability features such as N+1 redundant HVAC with concurrently maintainable chilled water piping loops; N+1 mechanical and electrical design for concurrent maintainability; a dedicated 34.5kV connection for power and 19.25 MW backed up by generators for critical power; 100,000 gallons of on-site fuel storage for 72 hours of run time; and dual, 250,000-gallon ground water wells to secure against the risk of a municipal water system failure.
“We are pleased to transfer DC-6 to the Cloud Capital team, whose extreme professionalism supported a smooth underwriting process and imbues us with confidence that our tenants will be well-served,” said Stephen E. Budorick, COPT president and chief executive officer. “Furthermore, this sale provides our company with cost-effective equity capital to fund our highly successful and value-accretive development pipeline; simplifies our corporate profile by removing the only multi-tenant data center from our portfolio; and further concentrates our capital allocation to defense/IT locations.”
