Anaheim Ducks owner Henry Samueli has made his largest reported acquisition, buying a three-building office complex that sits next to the Honda Center, home of his hockey franchise.
The deal appears to give Broadcom co-founder Samueli the potential to push for a larger redevelopment project around the city-owned arena than previously expected; he now owns or controls at least 50 acres to the immediate east of the Orange (57) Freeway that surround the stadium.
Samueli and his wife, Susan, through an affiliate of a family-controlled entity called H&S Ventures LLC, bought Arena Corporate Center, a trio of low-rise offices that total about 385,000 square feet, property records indicate.
The office complex, which sits directly north of the stadium on Douglass Road, sold for $125 million, based on a reading of property records.
That works out to a price of about $325 per square foot for the multitenant campus, whose occupants include a variety of mortgage, healthcare and other companies.
It’s the largest commercial property sale in Anaheim this year, according to records from real estate market tracker CoStar Group Inc.
It’s also the most expensive acquisition—real estate or otherwise—on record for the Samueli family, which operates much of its business lines through its Corona del Mar-based H&S Ventures entity. The H&S initials stand for Henry and Susan.
The $125 million deal exceeds the initial price paid for the hockey franchise; the couple bought the Ducks from Walt Disney Co. in 2005 for about $75 million. They took over operations of the stadium, previously known as the Arrowhead Pond, a few years earlier.
The hockey team is now valued at about $460 million, according to Forbes Magazine.
The Business Journal estimates the Samueli family’s fortune at about $4 billion.
H&S Ventures took out a $94.1 million loan with Irvine-based Pacific Premier Bank to fund the office buy, records show.
Philanthropy Focus
The Arena Corporate Center acquisition isn’t the only recent pricey expenditure for the Samueli family. Last year it announced a $200 million gift to the University of California-Irvine, one of the largest gifts bestowed to a U.S. public university.
About $55 million of the gift will be used to build a home for the Susan and Henry Samueli College of Health Sciences, a first-of-its-kind facility that will focus on interdisciplinary integrative health.
“The entire country is recognizing the fact that healthcare needs to change—the way we deliver healthcare needs to change,” Samueli said during a rare public appearance in October at OCTANe’s Medical Technology Innovation Forum in Newport Beach.
Samueli’s nonphilanthropic investments in Orange County have been rarely disclosed. Business Journal research shows his involvement in only one local business besides Broadcom over the past five years. H&S Ventures was part of a group that invested an estimated $70 million in Alphaeon Corp., an Irvine-based provider of healthcare and beauty products.
It’s not known whether H&S remains an investor in Alphaeon, which this year spun out Evolus Corp. (Nasdaq: EOLS) into a company that went public. Regulatory filings don’t show any ties between Samueli and Irvine-based Evolus.
Representatives of Samueli and the Ducks declined to comment on the Anaheim office deal and their plans for the area.
23 More Acres
The acquisition of Arena Corporate Center, on a roughly 23-acre site that has a fair share of excess land, gives the Ducks owner another potential site for residential, retail, office or other development.
The city of Anaheim reached an agreement last month to sell 16 acres of city-owned land around the stadium to the Ducks for $10.1 million.
In return, the city got the Ducks to commit to a 30-year lease extension at the 19,000-seat stadium and fund improvements over that time, among other considerations.
Anaheim Arena Management LLC, a unit of H&S Ventures, has run the Honda Center since 2003. As part of last month’s deal with the city, AAM will take over operations, but not ownership, of the city’s Artic transportation hub, which opened in 2014.
Artic is just south of the Honda Center on the opposite site of the stadium from the just-bought office complex.
H&S Ventures has 18 months to submit a development plan for the 16 acres it’s buying from Anaheim—lots on Katella Avenue now used as surface parking lots for Honda Center—according to city filings.
There’s plenty of potential entitlements available in the area, which falls within the 820-acre Platinum Triangle area of the city.
The area, when built out, could hold about 17,500 residential units, 9.2 million square feet of office development and another 4.8 million square feet of other commercial property types.
To date, apartment development—roughly 3,500 units—has made up the bulk of new construction in the Platinum Triangle over the past decade. Nearly another 1,900 residential units are in various stages of development, city filings indicated.
More than 10,000 additional residential units, along with much of the zone’s allowable commercial development, are allowed for the Platinum Triangle under current city guidelines, but have yet to be entitled to a specific property owner, city filings noted in last month’s proposed land sale agreement with H&S Ventures.
Selling the 16 acres of land to AAM would “create endless opportunities” for a unified redevelopment of the area, a memo from Anaheim city manager said in support of last month’s agreement.
“AAM is better positioned to develop around the Honda Center while finding solutions to mitigate traffic through greater use of the Artic station, as they can integrate their operations and transportation planning for the Honda Center, while utilizing its open space to promote greater fan experience,” the memo said.
City officials have indicated an entertainment and retail center is a likely option for a portion of the land. A large parking structure is also expected to replace some or all of the surface parking lots.
