A shopping center in Aliso Viejo that’s home to a Fat Burger, Wahoo’s Fish Taco and Golden Spoon appears to have gained the unlikely title of the most expensive retail property in Orange County.
A 47,000-square-foot section of the Shops at Aliso Viejo recently sold for $39 million. That puts the deal at $830 per square foot.
Such a price is unheard of for shopping centers, even with land at a premium in OC. Similar deals have been at about half that price per square foot, according to brokers who specialize in retail space.
YJC Investment Group, a private investment firm based in Los Angeles, was the buyer. Leaseback Inc., the Poway-based developer of Shops at Aliso Viejo, sold the space.
The 8-year-old center on Aliso Creek Road is just off the San Joaquin Hills (73) Toll Road.
The sale’s capitalization rate,the expected return from rents and fees,was 5%. That’s believed to be about as low as retail deals in OC are likely to go, brokers said.
Local retail buildings larger than 30,000 square feet traded at cap rates of around 6.5% last year, according to Grubb & Ellis Co. figures.
Three years ago, similar centers were selling with cap rates closer to 9%.
The situation isn’t unique to retail. As with office and industrial buildings, a flood of investor money has pushed up prices and pushed down cap rates.
Chalk up the high Aliso Viejo price to location and marketing, said Richard Walter, president of Irvine-based Faris Lee Investments, who along with colleague Dennis Vaccaro, represented the seller.
“The real estate is irreplaceable,” Walter said. “You can’t build anything new in Aliso Viejo.”
Price wasn’t a huge issue to the buyer, who sought an established center in an area where land is scarce, Walter said.
“It is a classic example of marketing property to the right buyer,” he said.
The deal was reached after about 30 days of marketing. The sale closed escrow in about 75 days, according to the brokers.
David Kim of Pacific Century Investments represented YJC.
Similar retail deals have been selling for $400 to $500 per square foot, said Dixie Walker, senior vice president for the Newport Beach-based office of Grubb & Ellis.
You “have to be very creative in the way you position a property” to get prices like $830 per square foot, Walker said.
The Aliso Viejo site, which is full, sits alongside an Edwards Theatres and other stores. Those buildings were not part of the deal.
This is the second time Faris Lee worked with Leaseback to sell part of the retail center.
In 2003, Faris helped sell a 17,600-square-foot building at the town center. The building, home to Stadium Brewery, sold for $5.8 million, or $330 per square foot.
The latest deal is the last piece of the project that Leaseback owns, according to Vaccaro.
Faris Lee, which helped sell about 80 retail properties nationally last year, has carved out a niche breaking down centers into several smaller sales at higher-than-normal prices.
A break-up sale of a center usually is done all at once. Buyers typically are looking to invest proceeds from a prior deal to avoid capital gains taxes.
In 2003, Faris Lee brokered sales at Torrance Crossroads, a nearly 500,000-square-foot center that was broken into eight pieces. They then were sold separately for a combined $138 million. That is about 30% higher than what the sellers paid for the property two years earlier.
Faris Lee used a similar plan last year for the $29 million sale of The Courtyards at Talega, a 56,000-square-foot shopping center in San Clemente that was broken into five parcels.
Such deals make it easier for tax-deferred investors to bid on West Coast shopping centers, which often are out of their price range when sold as a whole.
