Blackstone pays $42M for former Kroger distribution center in Commerce

Blackstone Group has been unloading some of its Los Angeles properties in recent years, but in the Commerce suburb, it is a buyer.

The New York-based private equity firm paid $42 million to acquire the three-building Commerce Business Center at 5811 – 5833 East 61st Street in Commerce, The Real Deal has learned.

The seller was Century City-based Magellan Group. It acquired the property — once home to a Kroger distribution facility — in 1997 for $5.3 million, according to its website. It redeveloped and refurbished the 12.5-acre site around four years later.

Located on the corner of 61st Street and South Eastern Avenue, the campus includes a 200,400-square-foot distribution facility, as well as two other buildings spanning 49,200 square feet each, CoStar analytics show. Tenants at the site include recycling company Allan Co., Elkay Plastics, LootCrate and The Shredders.

Neither Blackstone nor Magellan returned requests for comments.

Some of Magellan’s remaining holdings include a roughly 144,000-square-foot industrial site in Commerce, the 502,000-square-foot Magellan Gateway in El Monte, Calif., and a multi-tenant industrial park in Selma, Calif.

Blackstone’s presence in Los Angeles has been diminishing in recent years as the company seeks to unload its properties acquired through the 2007 Equity Office buyout. The firm — whose real estate division is headed by Jonathan Gray — sold the 212,000-square-foot property at 700 N. Brand Boulevard in Glendale to Canadian developer Onni Group for $55.3 million in November. Earlier this month, it sold a pair of nearby office buildings for $122 million to CBRE’s investment arm.

The giant private equity firm also made waves on a national scale when it purchased the Grand Wailea resort in Maui for $1.1 billion, marking the second largest deal for a single hotel.