Northgate Gonzalez Market, Orange County’s largest Hispanic grocer, is taking on a larger role as a shopping center owner and landlord in L.A. County.
The company recently paid about $9.3 million to buy four buildings at a shopping center in Paramount where it already has a location.
The purchase, which doesn’t include the building that holds the Northgate Gonzalez store, totals about 33,500 square feet.
The company already owned the building that holds its store. The store anchors the center. The four buildings gave Northgate an opportunity to control its image at the location.
“This property no longer fit the seller’s core strategy and created an opportunity for Northgate to control the merchandising mix of the property and enhance the shopping experience of their customers,” said Tom Lagos, a broker with the Los Angeles office of Colliers International who worked on the sale with colleagues El Warner and Senior Vice President James Rodriquez.
“This was another example of a recent trend among regional grocery chains to not only purchase the building they occupy but also the adjoining balance of the shopping center,” said Lagos, whose team recently completed a similar deal in Bakersfield for San Fernando Valley-based Vallarta Supermarkets Inc.
The Paramount Center, a few blocks north of the Artesia (91) Freeway, is one of nearly a dozen locations Northgate Gonzalez owns in Los Angeles. The company has about 30 stores across Southern California.
The family-owned grocer, which got its start in Anaheim in 1980, is said to own a few other of its grocery store locations but isn’t believed to own much retail real estate that it doesn’t directly occupy.
Closer to home, the company is reported to have sold some of its nonretail space.
Brokerage reports show Northgate Gonzalez recently selling four Anaheim office and industrial buildings, which total about 80,000 square feet, for about $5.5 million.
The buildings, on East Vermont Avenue, served as the company’s headquarters prior to its move in 2010 to a new building elsewhere in Anaheim, on Magnolia Avenue.
They sold near the end of April to a Carson-based investor, according to Costar Group Inc. records.
The grocer initially leased the new, 384,000-square-foot property on Magnolia Avenue, one of OC’s larger industrial developments of late. Last year it bought the property for a reported $45 million.
Extron Extras
Anaheim-based Extron Electronics Inc. has added another two buildings near its new headquarters to its growing real estate portfolio.
The maker of audiovisual products last month closed on the purchase of a pair of adjoining industrial buildings it was already leasing along East Ball Road and South Lewis Street, totaling about 157,000 square feet, according to brokerage data.
The buildings are across the street from Extron’s six-story, 198,000-square-foot headquarters at 1025 E. Ball Road—also home of The Ranch Restaurant & Saloon—which the company also owns.
Terms of last month’s sales, made with Irvine-based LBA Realty, weren’t immediately disclosed.
Extron had been paying a combined $1.1 million in annual rent for the two buildings as of 2011, according to regulatory filings by a former owner of the property, Los Angeles-based Kilroy Realty Co.
Kilroy sold the buildings to LBA Realty late last year as part of a 35-building portfolio sale of Orange County industrial properties.
Extron founder and Chief Executive Andrew Edwards said earlier this year that his company, which makes a variety of electronic products for projector systems used in auditoriums, boardrooms and classrooms, either owned or leased about 750,000 square feet of office and industrial space in Orange County.
Other local real estate deals the company has been involved in this year include a reported $17 million buy of a 110,600-square-foot office and manufacturing building that’s next-door to its new headquarters, which opened near the end of 2011.
Privately held Extron, founded about 30 years ago, employs about 1,300 people in Orange County.
The company started out in Garden Grove and later shifted to Santa Fe Springs before settling in Anaheim in 1995.
Extron also has offices in Chantilly, Va., and Raleigh, N.C., where it recently built a 144,000-square-foot office, complete with a training facility.
It also has training facilities in Toronto, New York, Europe and the Netherlands, among other places. It recently acquired a building in Dallas.
