Redcar pays $74M for Culver City office complex, eyes expansion

Redcar Properties, a Chinatown-based real estate investor that buys underperforming properties, added a four-acre office complex in Culver City to its portfolio for $73.5 million. And it has big plans for the property.

The seller of the office complex was Lionstone Group, which bought the complex in 2014 for $26.5 million, according to property records.

The Westside Jefferson Business Park is made up of three office buildings totaling 76,000- square-feet of office space, meaning Redcar paid about $967 per square foot to close the deal. Redcar, which claims to own or manage more than 30 buildings in Culver City, plans to expand the amount of leasable space at the recently purchased office complex through future redevelopment plans, according to an article published by Urbanize Los Angeles.

The property, which is located at 10301-10335 W. Jefferson Blvd., is leased to major tenants including Hello Design, XTEN Architecture and Zynga, and spans nearly four acres.

Redcar is one among many players to focus on the booming Culver City office market, a tech and media hub that has attracted massive creative companies such as Amazon, Apple and HBO, all of which have signed leases since 2017 for office space at developments within the city.

According to Cushman & Wakefield’s third quarter office report, Culver City has 2.2 million square feet of office space under construction, almost half of the office space being developed in Los Angeles. The vacancy rate in Culver City is plummeting while rents are increasing. Asking rents in the West LA submarket were $4.96 in the third quarter, the highest in Greater LA.

A few blocks from the newly acquired RedCar campus, Los Angeles Times Publisher Patrick Soon-Shiong has plans to expand the campus for NantWorks, the parent company of various bioscience firms that he runs, at 9920 Jefferson Blvd. And Coffee Beach & Tea Leaf plans to develop a 3.6-acre headquarters campus located a mile northeast of the office complex, at 6000 W. Jefferson Blvd.

Redcar – run by Jim Jacobsen, a former co-president of Lee & Associates/West L.A. – bought a warehouse in West Adams in May for $29 million, not far from a four-story office-and-retail development on West Adams Boulevard. The developer is also planning a 17,000-square-foot, three-story office building at 3516 Schaefer St., located just east of Metro’s Culver City Station. [Urbanize Los Angeles] – Pat Maio