AOL, our new owner, this morning announced that it has entered into an agreement for the sale of four office buildings it says it no longer utilizes, in addition to two undeveloped parcels of land on the East side of its Dulles campus. The buyer is CB Richard Ellis Realty Trust, who’s taking over AOL’s corporate park for $144.5 million in cash.
AOL says this means it has approximately $750 million of cash on hand as of October 29.
The deal is expected to close by mid-November and is subject to customary closing conditions.
In a statement, AOL EVP and Chief Financial and Administrative Officer Artie Minson says the company had already moved its Dulles workforce to one side of the campus, making the rest of the property effectively a “non-core asset”. He adds:
“With a long-term lease in place it made sense for us to pursue a sale to realize maximum value of these assets and add significant cash to our balance sheet.”
The combined total office space CB Richard Ellis is buying is approximately 700,000 rentable square feet in the four buildings and is known as Pacific Corporate Park. The two parcels of undeveloped land total approximately 22 acres.
AOL, which originally purchased the land located on the East side of its campus back in 1996, had vacated the office buildings by early 2010.
AOL continues to have over 1,800 full-time employees on its Dulles campus in three office buildings. AOL also maintains two data centers in Virginia — one on its Dulles campus and one in Manassas.
(Disclosure: TechCrunch was acquired by AOL back a few weeks ago. We didn’t, however, have prior knowledge to this deal.)
AOL is a global advertising-supported Web company, with display advertising network in the U.S., a substantial worldwide audience, and a suite of popular Web brands and products. The company’s strategy focuses on increasing the scale and sophistication of its advertising platform and growing the size and engagement of its global online audience through leading products and programming. History of Aol: AOL was founded in the early 1980’s as Control Video Corp, with an online service, Gameline, for the Atari 2600 console. ...
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