A Sausalito investment firm has added another East Bay office building to its portfolio, picking up the 106,000-square-foot property at 500 Ygnacio Valley Road in downtown Walnut Creek for roughly $22 million. The four-story Class A building is about 70% leased and sits close to the Walnut Creek BART station.
FH One Investments is the buyer, according to bizjournals.com, which reported the sale price at $22 million. The Real Deal described the transaction as a deed-in-lieu.
According to The Real Deal, the building is leased to tenants including United Business Bank and Old Republic Title, and sits roughly a 10-minute walk from the Walnut Creek BART station. Separately, a report on the building's prior ownership history from rebusinessonline.com placed the property two blocks east of the downtown BART station and less than half a mile from the Interstate 680/Highway 24 interchange, underscoring the site's position along one of the East Bay's key commuter corridors.
A Growing East Bay Footprint
This is not FH One's first East Bay office play. Per The Real Deal, the firm acquired the 176,000-square-foot Sutter Square office complex in Concord in summer 2026, and bizjournals.com separately reported that acquisition came at a 58% discount after the Concord property had reverted to its lender the prior year. The Real Deal also reports that FH One already owns Oakland's former Pacific Gas & Electric headquarters at 1625 Clay Street and has floated redeveloping that building into housing. Taken together, the deals point to a firm expanding its East Bay office holdings at a moment when discounted pricing has drawn investors into the submarket.
The Real Deal reports that FH One president Daria Hosseinyoun addressed the circumstances around the Walnut Creek deal directly, clarifying that a prior loan sale did not signal that the building or its submarket had failed, but rather that the loan no longer matched the building's value. The Real Deal also reports that Principal Real Estate Investors took that debt to market in May 2026, and that the prior owner, BroadShore Capital Partners, had accumulated an unpaid loan balance of $26 million on the property. By The Real Deal's account, FH One's purchase price was roughly 37% below the amount BroadShore paid when it acquired the complex in 2016.
Plans For the Building
FH One intends to manage the property directly going forward, according to The Real Deal, rather than bringing in a third-party operator. The firm's stated plans include upgrading tenant amenities with a new lounge and a redesigned conference center, and the Real Deal reports that FH One is targeting financial services, legal, insurance and other professional services firms as prospective tenants — a focus that lines up with the kind of occupiers already dominant in the submarket.
Where the Walnut Creek Market Stands
Market data on Walnut Creek's office sector paints a mixed but improving picture, with figures varying depending on the source and time period measured. Cushman & Wakefield reported the broader East Bay Walnut Creek office market closed the third quarter of 2026 at 30.3% vacancy, down 20 basis points from the prior quarter but still up 140 basis points year over year. That dip came alongside 40,651 square feet of net absorption and 272,997 square feet of total leasing activity, the highest level in more than a year, with 93% of that leasing volume coming from Class A space.
Colliers, meanwhile, reported a different geography and period: the Walnut Creek Downtown submarket specifically recorded 22.5% overall vacancy in the first quarter of 2026, according to a Colliers research report, with Class A vacancy in that submarket rising to 25.0%, a 500-basis-point jump from the year before. Colliers also noted that leasing activity in that quarter had reached its strongest level since mid-2024, with net absorption at its least negative point since 2023 — a sign of stabilization even as vacancy remained elevated. Class A asking rents in Downtown Walnut Creek ranged from $3.35 to $6.25 per square foot on a full-service basis during that quarter, per the same report, while Cushman & Wakefield separately put the broader submarket's overall asking rate at $3.06 per square foot on a monthly full-service basis in the third quarter.
Cushman & Wakefield also noted that Walnut Creek's office tenant base skews heavily toward finance, insurance, real estate and legal firms — the same sectors FH One says it's courting for 500 Ygnacio Valley Road. Other recent deals in the submarket suggest investors see opportunity at a range of price points: Synergy Petroleum Enterprises paid $14.5 million, or $113 per square foot, for the 128,090-square-foot Class A building at 1600 Riviera Avenue, while Cilker purchased the smaller, 21,200-square-foot building at 2099 Mount Diablo Boulevard for $7.7 million, or $362 per square foot, according to the same Cushman & Wakefield report.
The 500 Ygnacio Valley Road building itself has changed hands before. Lowe Enterprises Investors previously purchased the 105,495-square-foot structure for an undisclosed sum from seller Pacific Eagle (US) Real Estate Fund.
