The sale of a 360-unit apartment complex in Laguna Hills looks to be the priciest multifamily transaction seen in Orange County so far this year.
An affiliate of Pala Alto-based apartment investor Pacific Urban Residential recently completed the purchase of Prado at Laguna Hills, a complex on Los Alisos Boulevard, just west of the San Diego (I-5) Freeway near the Laguna Hills Mall.
The property changed hands for $89 million, or roughly $247,000 per unit, according to CoStar Group Inc. records.
The deal is nearly twice the price of the second-largest individual apartment sale in OC this year—Huntington Villas, a 198-unit complex in Huntington Beach that sold last month for about $47 million—according to brokerage data.
Pacific Urban, which focuses on apartment investments on the West Coast, has rebranded its new property as Sofi Laguna Hills.
The garden-style complex was built in 1978 and is on a little more than 16 acres, according to brokerage data. Rents at the complex average a little more than $1,550 per month.
It’s one of three Pacific Urban owns in OC, according to its website. Other complexes are in Anaheim and Costa Mesa.
The complex was sold by New York-based investor TGM Associates LP, which paid a reported $77 million for the property in 2008.
Pacific Urban is a subsidiary of Calabasas-based Marcus & Millichap Cos., the parent company of commercial brokerage Marcus & Millichap Real Estate Investment Services.
The apartment investor has a West Coast multifamily portfolio that runs more than 6,000 apartment homes, with a value of nearly $1.5 billion.
At the time of its last reported acquisition—a smaller complex in San Diego that it bought in February—the company said it expected to spend nearly $250 million between then and April on new investments in markets including OC, San Diego, Los Angeles, Northern California and Seattle.
New Source
A new source of funding appears to be helping fuel that buying spree. In January, Pacific Urban announced it had been selected by the California Public Employees’ Retirement System as a new manager for an apartment investment program.
The Pacific Urban-CalPers partnership, named Pacific Multifamily Investors, was formed to buy class B multifamily properties and was funded with an initial allocation of $200 million by the pension fund giant.
The Laguna Hills property appears to have been bought under that program; property records list the entity buying the complex as PMI Prado LLC.
The newly acquired complex could soon face some competition for renters if development plans at a shopping center next door to Sofi Laguna Hills move ahead.
Oakbrook Village Center, a 30-year-old retail center between Soft Laguna Hills and the Laguna Hills Mall, is slated to be redeveloped into a 489-unit apartment complex, along with 82,574 square feet of new retail space.
The deal for Sofi Laguna Hills came to light at about the same time as word of the sale of an office complex that’s expected to be demolished to make way for apartments in neighboring Laguna Niguel (see related story, page 3).
