Lincoln Properties Co. is in talks to buy the Los Alamitos City Hall and municipal center, a 3.1-acre site on Katella Avenue where the developer plans to build a shopping center.
The local office of Dallas-based Lincoln recently entered into negotiations with the city for the property at 3191 Katella Ave. The land now holds Los Alamitos’ city hall, police department, city yard and community center.
Lincoln Properties is looking to knock down the existing buildings, along with a nearly 10-acre office property it owns next door, to make way for a ground-up retail property.
The 13-acre shopping center project would run about 123,000 square feet, according to city documents.
The project would likely be anchored by a specialty grocer, according to Kevin Hayes, executive vice president for the Irvine office of Lincoln Properties.
Grocer
There hasn’t been a grocery-anchored shopping center of that size built in West Orange County in more than five years, according to brokerage data.
A proposed price for the land hasn’t been disclosed. Terms of the recently approved exclusive negotiation agreement give Lincoln Properties a year to analyze the site for potential development.
Long Wharf Real Estate Partners LLC, a Boston-based private equity real estate manager, is expected to be a capital partner in the development, according to city filings.
The developer would like to break ground on the project by the first quarter of next year, Hayes said.
Lincoln Properties made its first purchase in the city a little more than a year ago when it paid about $13 million for a two-building office project next to the city hall site.
That site, at 3131 Katella Ave., holds two buildings that run about 150,000 square feet. It’s the largest office property in the city.
The buildings previously were used by SuperMedia Inc., one of the country’s largest yellow-pages directory publishers.
Lincoln Properties bought the buildings from Dallas-based Dex Media Inc., which merged with SuperMedia in 2013. The tenants vacated the offices in September, according to Hayes.
SuperMedia was the fourth largest employer in Los Alamitos in 2010, with 350 employees; it had been cutting positions since then, a reflection of the declining use of phone books amid a shift toward digital media in that segment of marketing.
The Katella Avenue offices are just east of the San Gabriel Valley (605) Freeway, about a mile west of the Los Alamitos Race Course.
Lincoln Properties officials said at the time it bought the SuperMedia buildings that it was planning to keep the property as offices after making major upgrades.
Now the plan is to convert the office and city hall site—located at the fifth busiest intersection for vehicle traffic in OC—to a retail project, Hayes said. It “is seen as the largest viable site for future retail development” in Los Alamitos, according to city documents.
Flight Tweaks
The site is one of two notable OC projects that Lincoln Properties has in the works on land owned by a local municipality.
The company also is working with the city of Tustin on a multibuilding creative-office development near the blimp hangars at the city’s former Marine base.
The project, called Flight at Tustin Legacy, will include a number of four-story office buildings and will total about 523,000 square feet.
It’ll be the largest-ever ground-up creative office project in Orange County. A bulk of the area’s creative-office projects are redevelopments of existing buildings (see special report story, page 14).
Lincoln Properties previously planned to start rough grading for the Tustin project by March, with the first couple of speculative buildings largely completed by the end of this year.
The goal now is to start construction this July, with the first offices and an accompanying food hall to be finished around mid-2017, Hayes said.
The developer has been tweaking sight lines and other parts of the Flight project to make the offices fit in better with a park that will be part of the overall development, Hayes said.
