SAN DIEGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--SteelWave and Invesco Real Estate, a global real estate investment manager, announced today the acquisition of the former Los Angeles Times printing facility, which consists of a 249,075-square-foot printing press warehouse with an attached 112,408-square-foot office building (the former LA Times Orange County press room), and an adjacent 4.0-acre parcel of land, located in Costa Mesa, California. The project is directly adjacent to SteelWave’s Hive project, a 180,000-square-foot creative office project, which is the headquarters for the Los Angeles Chargers organization and their training facility.
The acquisition of The Press marks SteelWave’s first joint venture with Invesco Real Estate. “We are extremely excited to work with SteelWave on the redevelopment of such a unique property,” says Baker Morphy, Invesco Real Estate’s Director of Transactions. Holliday Fenoglio Fowler, L.P. (HFF) arranged acquisition financing for the development. The HFF debt placement team representing the borrower included senior managing director John Rose, managing director Todd Sugimoto, senior director Patrick Burger and analyst Olga Walsh.
The joint venture acquired the asset from Tribune Media and Kearny Real Estate Co. Tribune Real Estate Holdings, a subsidiary of former Los Angeles Times owner Tribune Media, and Kearny Real Estate Co. partnered up in 2015 with plans to transform the facility into approximately 340,000 square feet of creative office. However, in early 2017, SteelWave approached that partnership with an off-market offer to acquire the project.
The plan is to develop roughly 420,000 square feet of creative office space and retail. The site is entitled for up to approximately 650,000 square feet, leaving approximately 230,000 square feet of remaining entitlements for future development. Seth Hiromura, SteelWave’s Managing Director of Acquisitions and Development and head of the Orange County and San Diego regions, led the acquisition.
“We saw an immense potential in The Press and our vision is to redevelop the asset to be the single most significant creative office opportunity in Orange County, if not all of Southern California,” says Hiromura. “This will be an iconic project that pays tribute to the history of the building by embracing its character, making it unique to the region,” adds Jonathan Hastanan, Vice President of Acquisitions and Development.
In addition to office space, the plans include developing a high-end public market. Hiromura believes having a cluster of differentiated creative office adjacent to one major artery through Orange County is important, however, “Where we think this project and submarket can be taken to the next level is by creating a very dramatic public food hall-based retail concept,” says Hiromura. SteelWave and Invesco Real Estate plan to redevelop the project over the course of the next two years and hope to create more than another creative office project, but rather a destination for both locals and visitors to the area.
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About SteelWave
SteelWave is a full-service commercial, residential and mixed-use real estate management, operating company and investment management firm. SteelWave and its predecessor companies, Legacy Partners Commercial and Lincoln Property West, have been active in commercial real estate for 45 years. We’ve built a reputation for successful execution by sourcing sound investments in our 6 key markets: Northern California, Southern California, Denver, Seattle, Portland and Texas. As a vertically integrated leader in the industry, we source, entitle, design, finance, develop, renovate, lease, manage and sell real estate investments on behalf of many well-known institutional clients. In 2017, SteelWave brought Dennis Cavallari of The Cavallari Group (and previously a partner with Legacy Partners Residential) on board to oversee its multifamily and mixed-use development and acquisition opportunities.
Since its inception, the SteelWave team has acquired, developed or managed 6,000 multifamily units, 60.1M SF of industrial product and 36.6M SF of office product across our Western United States target markets at a combined cost of over $10.7 billion.
About Invesco
Invesco is an independent investment management firm dedicated to delivering an investment experience that helps people get more out of life. NYSE: IVZ; www.invesco.com
About Invesco Real Estate
Invesco Real Estate is a global leader in the real estate investment management business with $65.1 billion in real estate assets under management, 461 employees and 21 regional offices across the U.S., Europe and Asia. The firm was established in 1983 and has been actively investing in core, value-add and opportunistic real estate strategies since 1992. Invesco Real Estate is a business name of Invesco Advisers, Inc. which is an indirect, wholly owned subsidiary of Invesco Ltd., (NYSE: IVZ), one of the largest investment management firms in the world with $834.8 billion in assets under management and on-the-ground presence in 29 cities worldwide. Information as of September 30, 2017.
About HFF
HFF and its affiliates operate out of 24 offices and are a leading provider of commercial real estate and capital markets services to the global commercial real estate industry. HFF, together with its affiliates, offers clients a fully integrated capital markets platform, including debt placement, investment advisory, equity placement, funds marketing, M&A and corporate advisory, loan sales and loan servicing. HFF, HFF Real Estate Limited, HFF Securities L.P. and HFF Securities Limited are owned by HFF, Inc. (NYSE: HF). For more information, please visit hfflp.com or follow HFF on Twitter @HFF.
HFF, acting by and through Holliday GP Corp., is a real estate broker licensed with the California Department of Real Estate, License Number 01385740.
