The Sterling Organization has followed a big retail purchase in Westlake Village with an encore in Huntington Park.
The Palm Beach, Florida-based firm paid $23.8 million for Margarita Plaza, a 76,800-square-foot shopping center at 6920 Santa Fe Avenue, about four miles south of Downtown L.A.
The property, which is 93 percent occupied, is anchored by a 43,350-square-foot Food 4 Less grocery store. Other tenants include a Little Caesar’s Pizza and Jackson Hewitt tax preparation office. The sale comes out to $309 per square foot.
Last month, Sterling topped L.A. County’s retail investment sales list with the $35 million purchase of the North Ranch Gateway shopping center in Westlake Village.
The Margarita Plaza deal was an off-market sale. The seller was Oakland-based Rubenstein Capital LLC, which first bought a stake in the property in 2007 as part of a larger investment group that paid $15.8 million. Rubenstein bought out its partners in 2009. The firm took out a $12.5 million mortgage on the property with First Foundation Bank in 2016.
Sterling made the purchase for its institutional grocery-anchored shopping center core fund, Sterling United Properties I, LP. That’s a different fund than the value-add fund it started this year, which it used to buy the shopping center in Westlake Village. Sterling closed that fund in July with $500 million to buy up ailing shopping centers.
The firm landed in L.A. in 2016 with the purchase of a 4,700-square-foot storefront in Beverly Hills for $23.5 million. It’s made three big moves in the southeastern U.S. this year, including the $72.8 million sale of an Orlando-area shopping center it purchased in 2013 for $45.1 million.