California investor pays $11 million for Tampa office building

A California-based real estate investment firm with an office in Tampa has bought a three-story office building in the city, paying $10.97 million.

The building is the Lakeview Center just off Martin Luther King Boulevard in East Tampa.

According to Ciminelli Real Estate Services, which represented the seller and announced the deal, the building has 187,129 rentable square feet and sits on 19.31 acres. It was built in 1984. Until recently, the single tenant was HealthPlan Services.

The buyer is an LLC named WSI Lakeview. A search of the state’s Division of Corporations database shows the company’s principal address is in Tampa and that the address for its manager is in Irvine, California. Both addresses belong to the real estate investment firm Richland Investments.

In a separate statement, Richland Capital Holdings, which is a division of Richland Investments, says it bought the property at an auction last month.

The company was founded in Toronto in the 1970s and expanded into Orlando and Tampa in the mid-1980s, according to a history on its website. In 2003, it moved its headquarters from Tampa to Newport Beach, California. Today the company has the office in Tampa and three others, including its headquarters in Irvine.

Since the company was founded it has controlled more than 100,000 acres of land valued in excess of $4 billion according to its website.

Locally, Richland Capital says it’s bought two multifamily properties in the past 18 months, The Gray in Tampa and The Lodge in Orlando. It is also developing 1,100 multifamily units and has recently broken ground on an industrial development off Interstate 4 just outside Orlando.

As for Lakeview Center, Ciminelli says the plan is to redevelop the property for industrial use. Richland says the “plans for the repositioning and further development of the site are well underway.”