The owner of Asian-themed grocery store chain 99 Ranch Market has bought a large distribution facility next to its headquarters in Buena Park in one of the priciest industrial sales in Orange County this year.
An affiliate of Tawa Supermarket Inc., which operates 99 Ranch, last month completed the purchase of 6300 Regio Ave., a roughly 300,000-square-foot building near the intersection of the Santa Ana (5) and Artesia (91) freeways.
The building, located on about 16.5 acres, traded hands for about $41 million, based on property transfer taxes paid in the transaction.
It appears to be one of just two single-building industrial properties in OC to have traded hands this year for more than $40 million, according to CoStar Group Inc. records.
The seller of the Buena Park property was an affiliate of Georgia-Pacific Corrugated LLC, which had long operated a corrugated box-producing plant at the 1962 facility.
Atlanta-based Georgia Pacific, which is owned by Koch Industries in Wichita, Kan., announced in February that it would be closing the facility by September, resulting in about 150 job cuts.
The company said it was shuttering the plant for efficiency reasons; Georgia-Pacific operates similar facilities nearby, including one in La Mirada, officials said in February.
Big Addition
The property looks to be the largest and priciest local real estate buy on record for Tawa Supermarket, a privately held grocer formed in 1984 by Taiwanese expatriate Roger Chen and a business partner.
The company’s first store was a 16,000-square-foot property in Westminster that they named Man Wah Supermarket.
Chen rebranded the stores in 1988 as 99 Ranch Market—many Chinese consider 9 a lucky number because it is said to symbolize longevity.
It is now one of the largest Chinese-American grocery chains in the U.S, with 42 stores, including 33 in California, according to its website. There are three 99 Ranch Market stores in OC—two in Irvine and another in Anaheim.
The chain also has stores in Texas, Washington and Nevada.
It had about $350 million in revenue last year, according to industry sources, employing 650 in Orange County and about 2,200 companywide.
Tawa Supermarket owns at least three other industrial buildings along Regio Avenue, according to CoStar records. Those buildings—including its headquarters at 6281 Regio—total a little more than 300,000 square feet, according to property records.
Its last industrial purchase in the vicinity of its headquarters was for a roughly 80,000-square-foot facility in 2007, according to CoStar records.
Expansion Plans
The company hasn’t disclosed the reasons behind the latest purchase; attempts to reach Tawa officials for comment last week were unsuccessful.
Tawa has been looking to expand its presence in a few new markets over the past year.
It reportedly paid about $6.5 million for a pair of existing stores in New Jersey around the start of the year in a bankruptcy auction. Those stores were previously operated by Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co. of Montvale, N.J.
The company hiring employees for those yet-to-open locations, its first on the East Coast, according to the grocer’s website.
It also has added a trio of West Coast stores previously owned by Haggen Holdings LLC—in San Diego, Chula Vista, and Beaverton, Ore.—in bankruptcy-driven deals over the past year, according to local news reports.
The Beaverton location, which has yet to open, would be its first in Oregon.
Tawa Supermarket’s main competitors include New York-based Hong Kong Supermarket; Shun Fat Supermarket in Monterey Park; and H Mart, which is based in Lyndhurst, N.J.
Other locally based grocery chains include Anaheim-based Northgate González Markets, which caters to Latino-Americans.
Northgate González main facility on Magnolia Avenue in Anaheim is about 384,000 square feet.
J.C. Penney
The former Georgia-Pacific facility that Tawa Supermarket bought is one of nine industrial buildings in Buena Park that are 300,000 square feet or larger, according to CoStar data.
The biggest of those buildings, a nearly 1.1 million-square-foot building on Valley View Street that’s owned by J.C. Penney, is on the market.
The J.C. Penney property, about a mile from Tawa Supermarket’s buildings, could fetch $125 million or more in a sale, real estate sources tell the Business Journal.
Buena Park’s industrial market totals about 13.5 million square feet and had counted a vacancy rate of just under 3.6% at the end of September, according to data from Newport Beach-based brokerage Voit Real Estate Services.
