Shopoff Realty Investments is looking to convert a nearly 21-acre industrial property in downtown Anaheim into a major residential development with more than 500 homes, townhomes and apartments.
The Irvine-based development company recently filed a conceptual site plan with the city that proposes turning a big industrial property on East South Street used by trade-show company Freeman Co. into a residential development.
The facility—between East South and East Santa Ana streets, about three-quarters of a mile from Anaheim’s city hall—would be razed to make way for 72 single-family detached homes, 162 single-family attached homes, and 296 apartments, under the current plan.
The project, as now envisioned, would be the largest new housing development by unit count—530 total—proposed for the downtown Anaheim area since the recession.
The plans are still in the early stages and revisions by the developer are likely in the coming months. The conceptual application was filed with the city in order to get feedback from city planners.
The city is due to respond to the developer’s initial plans by early October.
It will be up to Shopoff Realty to pursue a formal application, city officials said.
“We are reviewing this initial proposal, which at first glance seems to speak to the city’s vision for downtown,” said Mike Lyster, chief communications officer for Anaheim, in a statement.
“In the past decade, we’ve seen more than 2,000 homes built downtown, which has brought thousands of people within walking distance of the Packing House and Center Street Promenade,” Lyster said, citing two relatively recent retail developments in the area.
Transition
The 900 E. South St. property is owned by Dallas-based Freeman Co., a maker of exhibits for trade shows and other exhibitions.
The company moved into the nearly 400,000-square-foot facility in 2000, when it bought the property for about $11 million, according to CoStar Group Inc. records. The building previously was owned and used by Japanese conglomerate Hitachi Ltd. as a distribution facility for televisions and electronic components.
Shopoff Realty is under contract to buy the property from Freeman Co., which would likely lease back the site for a short-term period until entitlement work is completed, according to area brokers.
Freeman Co. is looking for a similar amount of space elsewhere in the area to lease, brokers tell the Business Journal.
A sale price hasn’t been disclosed. The Irvine office of brokerage JLL is representing the buyer and seller in the deal, according to sources.
The site is a few blocks east of the Anaheim Packing House, the food hall built in 2014 by Shaheen Sadeghi’s LAB Holding LLC, and is next to Brookfield Residential’s Colony Park, a 670-unit housing development that kicked off construction in 2006.
Colony Park is the largest of 15 residential projects built in downtown Anaheim over the past decade and has brought 2,086 homes, townhomes and apartments to the area, according to city records.
The neighborhood “has been transitioning from … industrial uses to a working class, multi-family residential market,” Shopoff Realty said in its initial letter to the city proposing the development.
Shopoff’s project would “feature three different product types to insure a home builder and the community has plenty of product segmentation including apartment units, townhomes and single-family detached residential uses,” the letter said.
The initial plan calls for single-family homes as large as 1,967 square feet and with as many as three bedrooms, most with two stories.
For-sale townhomes would be 1,250 square feet to 1,925 square feet and would be distributed among 31 three-story buildings.
Apartments would be 725 square feet to 1,275 square feet and would include a five-story parking structure for residents, according to filings with the city.
Shopoff would likely split the property into two parcels, which would then be sold to homebuilders or apartment developers, the company said last week.
Uptown, Huntington Beach
The mix of for-sale homes, townhomes and apartments is somewhat similar to another Orange County project that Shopoff Realty has in the works: the Uptown Newport mixed-use project near John Wayne Airport.
Plans call for the 25-acre site on Jamboree Road near the Newport Beach-Irvine city line to hold more than 1,200 homes and apartments. The project—once home to commercial properties—would differ from the Anaheim proposal by including some taller residential towers.
Construction on the first phase of Uptown Newport—an apartment project being co-developed by Shopoff and San Juan Capistrano-based Picerne Group—is scheduled to start next month.
The Uptown project has been in the works for a couple of years, but the Anaheim proposal is the second big local development plan announced by Shopoff Realty in as many months.
The company last month closed on a nearly 29-acre site in Huntington Beach, about a block from Pacific Coast Highway.
The land now holds three large above-ground oil tanks, which Shopoff Realty plans to demolish to make way for a mixed-use development with homes, a hotel and other commercial uses.
The company has put a $500 million price tag on the proposed development, which is likely to face several years of entitlement work before groundbreaking could occur.
