A pair of shopping centers in North Orange County have been bought for a combined price of $55.3 million by a San Diego investor that is also eyeing another property in Huntington Beach.
Retail Opportunity Investments Corp., a real estate investment trust that buys necessity-based community and neighborhood shopping centers, said late last month that it had closed on the purchase of Cypress Center West, a nearly 106,000-square-foot center on Ball Road in Cypress.
The center sold for $27.6 million, or about $260 per square foot. The property, which is anchored by a Ralphs supermarket and Rite Aid, is about 94% leased.
ROIC also bought Harbor Place Center, a roughly 120,000-square-foot shopping center on Harbor Boulevard in Garden Grove.
That center sold for $27.7 million, or about $231 per square foot. Harbor Place Center is listed as being fully leased, but an Albertsons that had been at the location no longer is in operation.
ROIC said it is in advanced discussion with other national retailers to fill the Albertsons space. The other anchor tenant at the center, located a few blocks from the Garden Grove (22) Freeway, is a Ross Dress for Less.
The two OC shopping centers were part of a four-property portfolio, totaling about 444,000 square feet, that’s being bought by ROIC for a combined $114 million. The other two centers include properties in Redondo Beach and Diamond Bar.
The Diamond Bar shopping center sale is expected to close this quarter. The other three deals closed in December.
All four centers were last owned by a Glendale-based family trust, according to CoStar Group Inc. records.
ROIC official said they were introduced to the deal “through a long-standing relationship.”
ROIC said it also has the rights of first refusal to acquire the same seller’s remaining properties in Southern California, which include three additional grocery-anchored shopping centers.
The Glendale-based family also owns Peninsula Marketplace, a 95,000-square-foot shopping center in Huntington Beach, along with properties in Burbank and Hawthorne.
Peninsula Marketplace, located about two miles from the ocean at Goldenwest Street and Garfield Avenue, is anchored by a Ralphs and is about 95% leased.
Terms of that proposed deal, or a timeline for a sale being completed, have not been disclosed. The Huntington Beach center last traded hands in 2003 for a reported $27.2 million, or about $275 per square foot.
The recent deals are the first in OC in nearly three years for ROIC, an investor headed up by Stuart Tanz, the former chief executive of San Diego-based Pan Pacific Retail Properties, now part of Kimco Realty Corp.
Tanz was last in the news locally in late 2008, when he was nominated to the board of then Santa Ana-based Grubb & Ellis Co. in an unsuccessful proxy battle.
ROIC also owns Santa Ana Downtown Plaza, a nearly 100,000-square-foot center that it paid about $17.3 for in early 2010.
The company now owns more than 40 shopping centers and counts a market value of about $680 million.
ROIC moved its headquarters from White Plains, N.Y., to San Diego last year, a shift that followed a recent focus on West Coast acquisitions.
