Local commercial and industrial real-estate firm Christiansen & Portela has completed the sale of the Corporate Center at Roosevelt office building in Caparra to a group of investors for $28.1 million, CARIBBEAN BUSINESS has learned.

The eight-story, 111,000-square-foot building on Roosevelt Avenue, located next to Doral Financial Corp.’s new headquarters, will be renamed Doral Plaza and will be the home to a variety of businesses including Doral Bank, commercial offices, and a fitness center.

The commercial office building, built by Clema Investments LLP in 2003, is 100% compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act and is equipped with many modern energy-saving features that offer its new owners cost effectiveness and efficiency on par with similar state-of-the-art office buildings across the nation, said Irma Irizarry, spokeswoman for Christiansen & Portela.

The building’s multistory parking structure has a capacity for more than 450 vehicles. This, plus its close proximity to PR2, Kennedy Avenue, and Martinez Nadal Expressway, made this investment opportunity very attractive to the new owners, Irizarry added.

Motivated by the success of this project, Christiansen & Portela is now working with three other development companies to market their condominium-office projects in Miramar and Hato Rey. While all three projects are in the preliminary design and permit-process stages, Christiansen & Portela expects to start marketing them in early 2005. A fourth project, consisting of the conversion of an existing office building into a condominium-office project on Hato Rey’s Golden Mile, is also under evaluation.

Other recent real-estate transactions handled by Christiansen & Portela include the sale of the 200,000-square-foot J.C. Penney warehouse and the leasing of more than 500,000 square feet of space at the Capitol Office Building in Miramar, Intel’s manufacturing facilities in Las Piedras, the Hato Rey Tower Building (now Westernbank World Plaza), AIG Building, Citibank Towers, IBM Tower, Galeria Paseo Portuario in Old San Juan, and Las Vistas Village in Cupey.

Additionally, the firm has sold more than 1,000 acres of land in the municipalities of Bayamon, Las Piedras, Coamo, Santa Isabel, and Ponce within the last three years.

Real-estate specialists Gerald J. Christiansen and Rafael Portela founded Christiansen & Portela in 1997. With more than $56.6 million in sales during the first nine months of this fiscal year, it is surpassing all sales projections for 2004.