Gary Jabara has refinanced part of his commercial real estate portfolio and received funding for several new buys through a $110 million deal with New York-based H.I.G. Realty Partners.
As the Business Journal first reported last month, the telecom infrastructure executive and real estate investor last month bought two retail-focused properties along Coast Highway in Laguna Beach and Huntington Beach as part of a nearly $150 million push into commercial real estate.
JLL arranged the acquisition financing for part of the deal; the buyer was Jabara’s Boardwalk Investments Group, a new entity that runs his already-extensive commercial real estate portfolio here and in other California markets.
JLL’s John Chun, John Marshall and analysts Sam Godfrey and Jake Fideler represented the borrower, while Michael Mestel represented H.I.G.’s real estate credit fund.
New, Old
The recent PCH purchases were the largest reported collection of commercial real estate buys for Jabara, who over the past decade has become one of the area’s largest private real estate owners and investors, using proceeds from his work at Newport Beach-based Mobilitie LLC, the country’s largest privately held wireless infrastructure firm.
The real estate acquisitions aren’t part of Mobilitie, Jabara previously told the Business Journal.
“We’re not a fund, we’re not flipping. We’ll keep them as legacy holdings,” he said.
The new assets include Surf City’s 5th & PCH property; Aliso Creek Shopping Center in Laguna Beach; and a high-end Restoration Hardware restaurant, gallery and wine tasting property in the Napa Valley city of Yountville.
The deal with H.I.G. involved some of those assets and refinanced other OC assets already in Boardwalk’s portfolio, including the Landing shopping center on Balboa Peninsula.
The shopping center, across the street from Bob Olson’s Lido House hotel, is home to the flagship restaurant and taproom for Chihuahua Cerveza, which Jabara also owns. Chihuahua recently passed the one-year mark; it’s sold some 1.3 million bottles and cans of its Mexican-American beer in the U.S.
“Both JLL Capital Markets and H.I.G. provided best-in-class execution and we’re positioned to continue to scale our platform and pursue trophy-quality assets across coastal California,” said Tom Lam, Boardwalk managing director, in a statement.
