A Texas investor snapped up a Los Angeles adaptive-reuse project a year after it was delivered.
Houston-based investment firm Civicap Partners bought Redcar Properties’ 122,700-square-foot office and retail building at 843 North Spring Street in Chinatown for $35.8 million, Commercial Observer reported. The price works out to $292 per square foot.
Civicap secured a loan modification for $42.3 million in construction financing from Bank OZK, the outlet said. Bank OZK originally provided a $43.7 million construction loan in 2020.
Santa Monica-based Redcar purchased the property for $15 million in 2018, when it was a retail warehouse.
Redcar and design firm Lever Architecture spent years turning the property into a five-story office and retail building with cross-laminated timber construction — one of the largest properties in L.A. to utilize the sustainable building material.
The acquisition is one part of a larger portfolio deal in Los Angeles between Civicap and Redcar, but details about other properties included in the agreement haven’t been disclosed.
Southern California office conversions usually involve transforming offices into something else, not the other way around.
Jamison Properties, for example, has office-to-residential projects underway in Koreatown including efforts to turn a 20-story office building at 3550 Wilshire Boulevard into 495 apartments. Its nearby endeavor at 3325 Wilshire is redeveloping a 13-story office building into 236 units.
The largest adaptive reuse project on Jamison’s plate at the moment is the conversion of the Arco Tower in downtown Los Angeles into 700 residential units. The company is currently seeking entitlements for the project.
Hollywood studio developers and executives are similarly considering adaptive reuse alternatives for film studios that have begun to collect cobwebs as productions flee L.A. for other states and countries.
Amazon, for example, transformed buildings in downtown Culver City into its Culver Studios facility, while developer East End Studios is building its Mission Campus partially at a former cold-storage facility.
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