Chinatown Retail Complex With Redevelopment Potential Sells For $29.5M
A Chinatown shopping center spread across two buildings on the block bounded by Spring Street and Broadway has sold for $29.5M.
Lee & Associates announced the sale but not the buyer, which documents filed in the Los Angeles County Superior Court identify as Redcar Properties. The sale required court confirmation because it was a partition action sale, the result of the property’s co-owners not being able to agree about whether to sell the property.
Redcar outbid two other prospective buyers, Vernon-based INI Investment Corp. and Shomof Group, which is planning a 153-unit residential project on the same block.
The property at 800-812 North Broadway and 821 North Spring St., also known as the Dynasty Shopping Center, was placed on the market in September 2019, court documents show. It attracted a number of offers and was slated to sell for $32M until the coronavirus pandemic pushed the city and state into a lockdown and derailed the sale.
It is unclear what Redcar plans for the property or on what timeline, but the buyer was technically Redcar Fund 1 LP, a fund that "focuses on value-add and opportunistic investments with a specialty in creative offices," according to PERE.
"The potential for redevelopment was always on the table because of the property's size," Lee & Associates – Pasadena’s Robert Leveen told Bisnow.
The property is located in a Transit Oriented Communities Tier 3 area, and the neighborhood is covered by the Downtown LA 2040 Plan, an update to Downtown’s community plan that aims to create a path for more than 100,000 new housing units to be added to the area over the next two decades.
Redcar does significant business in Chinatown, including on the same block as the Dynasty Shopping Center. It purchased the retail complex on the northeast corner of the block, at Spring and College streets, in 2018 for $15M, according to public records. A five-story office building constructed with mass timber is rising on the site now, according to Urbanize.
Leveen along with Jamie Harrison and Lee & Associates – Commerce’s Mike D. Smith and Armen Kazaryan represented the seller in the transaction.
CORRECTION, JULY 22, 6:20 A.M. PT: A previous version of this story misspelled the surname of Robert Leveen as Nuveen. The article has been updated.
