Shopoff Realty Investments has been breaking off portions of the Sacramento Bee property it owns and selling it off. The latest portion of the property that the Irvine-based real estate company sold was a parking lot.
Irvine-based Shopoff Realty sold the 9.25-acre parking lot in midtown Sacramento to Beazer Homes USA, an Atlanta-based housing developer, for $9.8 million, it was announced on Jan. 2.
Beazer Homes plans to build 48 townhomes on the property at 2100 Q Street, which was previously used as a parking lot for Sacramento Bee’s newspaper operations.
In 2017, Shopoff Realty purchased the Sacramento Bee property from The McClatchy Co., as part of a sale-leaseback deal. McClatchy declared bankruptcy in 2020 and vacated the property a year later, opening the door for Shopoff to sell or entitle various portions of the property, according to a company statement.
“When we purchased the Sacramento Bee building, we were pleased to be able to lease the building back to McClatchy and generate income, but we knew the property and its prime midtown location offered extensive opportunities for future improvement and redevelopment,” Shopoff Realty President and Chief Executive Bill Shopoff said in a statement.
Shopoff will be the keynote speaker at the Business Journal’s Excellence in Entrepreneurship Awards event on March 20.
“Over the last three years, we have been able to find appropriate buyers for the individual lots that make up this unique property and have worked closely with the city on re-entitling portions of the property, like this former parking lot, for residential.”
Shopoff Realty, represented by Providence West in the sale, secured entitlements from the city of Sacramento for the property.
The units would be built within eight three-floor buildings.
Buying the Sacramento Bee HQ
Sacramento Bee operated at 2100 Q Street for nearly 70 years when, according to the media outlet, Shopoff Realty bought the newspaper’s nearly 410,000-square-foot property for $57 million in 2017.
The McClatchy Co., Sacramento Bee’s parent company, also used the property at 2100 Q Street as its national headquarters and intended to stay at the building as part of a sale-leaseback transaction. McClatchy, operators of 30 daily newspapers across the country, agreed to a 15-year triple net lease with Shopoff Realty, at the time of the sale-leaseback deal.
The property is located in Sacramento’s Midtown market, an area south of the state capital complex, and was transitioning from an industrial section of town to a residential neighborhood.
A Shopoff Realty statement said more than 650 housing units were planned or under development when the Irvine-based real estate company bought the Sacramento Bee site.
In 2023, Shopoff Realty announced it planned to build a 538-unit apartment complex at the former Sacramento Bee site, located just two miles east of Golden1 Center, the NBA arena built by a Newport Beach real estate investment company (Raj Capital) headed by the Bhathal family (see profile, page 10).
A Shift in Plans
Plans to convert the property into an apartment complex have since been scrapped.
Shopoff Realty, in a statement, confirmed it has already sold off most of the Sacramento Bee headquarters’ assets, with only the main building remaining to sell. The Irvine-based real estate company plans to tear down the main building, secure entitlements to build 121 townhomes in its place and sell the site by the spring of this year.
Shopoff Realty confirmed it has already sold the property’s daycare building, fleet building, cell tower, a parking easement and an additional parking lot on 21st and Q streets, where the former Sacramento Bee operations was located.
The Sacramento Bee is now located just east of the state capital and the city’s central business district.
