A 152,000-square-foot creative office campus in Culver City in a designated Opportunity Zone just sold to two prominent real estate investors.
Lincoln Property Co. and Clarion Partners paid $169 million to acquire the seven-acre Jefferson Creative Campus, located on Jefferson Boulevard, Bisnow reported. They paid about $1,100 a square foot to pick up the recently renovated office campus, which is leased to tenants including MedMen, Spin Master and Prana Studios.
Lincoln Property, one of the country’s largest real estate firms, and New York-based real estate investment manager Clarion, know the local market – and each other – well. Clarion bought the historic Eastman Kodak site in Hollywood from Lincoln Property for $61 million in 2016. The pair are also jointly developing a 125,000-square-foot, mixed-use office-and-retail building nearby at 8777 Washington Boulevard in Culver City. That development is fully pre-leased to Apple.
The sellers of the fully leased Jefferson Creative Campus were listed as Ron Rader’s Rader Properties Group and Rodeo Properties. A Newmark Knight Frank team negotiated the deal on behalf of the sellers.
Culver City, a tech and media hub that has attracted massive creative companies such as Amazon, Apple and HBO, is one of the hottest creative market districts in the Los Angeles area. According to a recent Cushman & Wakefield’s office report, Culver City has 2.2 million square feet of office space under construction, almost half of the office space being developed in Los Angeles. Asking rents in the West LA submarket are nearly $5 a square foot per month, the highest in Greater LA.
Last year, Kilroy Realty paid $185 million — nearly 25 percent above the asking price — for the media-focused “Blackwelder” office campus in the city.
That adaptive reuse campus, located on the corner of La Cienega Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue, spans nearly 158,000-square-feet across the 19 standalone buildings.
Residential developers are responding to the demand created by well-paid creative workers in Culver City. Bastion Development Corp., a Vancouver-based developer, recently submitted plans to the city of Los Angeles to build a mixed-use project that would include 139 apartment units and 3,600 square feet of retail space on the first floor. That development, at 10375 West Washington Boulevard, will be located across the street from Sony Pictures’ Culver City studio.
Though the campus is located in an Opportunity Zone, it’s unclear if the buyers would attempt to take advantage of the federal program, which allows owners to defer or forego capital gains taxes.
[Bisnow] — Tina Daunt