Irvine-based Shopoff Realty Investments has completed two purchases and a sale in Los Angeles County over the past month valued at more than $100 million.
In what appears to be the largest of the three transactions, the investor and developer, which focuses on opportunistic and value-add real estate investments, said this month that it bought a 46-acre manufactured housing community called Brookside in the San Gabriel Valley city of El Monte.
The site, near the intersection of the Pomona (60) and San Gabriel River (605) freeways, sold for $52.7 million, according to the buyer.
The community has 421 home sites and was 64% occupied at the time of sale. Shopoff Realty said it plans to reposition, re-tenant and stabilize the property by filling up 150 empty mobile home sites.
“It is a rare opportunity to acquire a value-add asset of significant scale within the Los Angeles market,” said John Santry, executive vice president in the company’s land division, in a statement.
The mobile home park sits close to the California Country Club golf course, which runs along the 605. Another golf course in L.A. County about 25 miles away in Carson was the site of Shopoff Realty’s other recent acquisition in the region.
The company said it invested in the entity that holds the ground lease for the Links at Victoria Golf Course, a roughly 170-acre property near the intersection of the San Diego (405) and Harbor (110) freeways.
Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. Shopoff Realty said it plans to fund improvements to golf course facilities, including a new driving range scheduled to open next month.
The deal “fits in well with our overall portfolio as we focus on properties in core infill locations with value-add components,” said Chief Executive Bill Shopoff.
Readers might remember Shopoff Realty as one of the developers previously interested in buying a similar site in Orange County, the nearly 127-acre Santa Ana Country Club, which straddles the Costa Mesa-Newport Beach city line.
I wrote a story two years ago about that club’s members deliberating whether to sell the valuable site to one of several interested companies that wanted to replace the golf course with homes and other properties. It was to sell for an estimated price of more than $200 million.
Enough members resisted the developers’ overtures, however, and a sale never took place. The golf course has since been upgraded.
The Links at Victoria Golf Course is next to Carson’s blimp station and a short walk from the StubHub Center, where the Los Angeles Chargers will be playing home games for the next few years until a football stadium in Inglewood is built at an expected cost of $2.6 billion.
About a mile from the new site in Inglewood, Shopoff Realty completed the sale of an 18-acre land site last month that it bought in 2013 for a reported $20 million. The site has since been entitled for 310 homes, and was sold to Harridge Development Group in Los Angeles for about $38 million, according to local news reports. Bryant Brislin of Irvine-based land brokerage Hoffman Co. brokered the land deal.
Calling All Developers
The Business Journal’s annual list of Orange County’s top commercial developers runs in our June 12 issue.
With a surge in ground-up and redevelopment projects that kicked off over the past few years, we want to make sure no potential entries to the latest list are overlooked.
If your company has completed or broken ground on an office, industrial, retail, hotel, or mixed-use development in OC in the past year, contact our research director, Dana Truong, at truong@ocbj.com to request a list survey. The entry deadline is June 2.
Commercial projects larger than 50,000 square feet are likely large enough to qualify for the upcoming list. Creative-office and other substantive redevelopment work on existing properties are also candidates.
