Fifield Companies, a major development firm based in Chicago, is making a play in the fast-growing Inland Empire.
The firm recently bought a 10-acre site in Riverside, where it’s working on entitlements for a 281-unit apartment complex. The deal closed at $11 million, according to a release from Land Advisors Organization, the brokerage that co-represented both sides of the deal. The seller was a family trust.
The property is located in La Sierra, a neighborhood on Riverside’s west side that was recently upzoned by the city.
It’s part of a larger trend. For years now, as thousands of residents of L.A. and the Bay Area have fled the urban core because of high housing costs, the two-county Inland Empire, which includes the city of Riverside, has seen a population surge that’s expected to continue. One recent study of both San Bernardino and Riverside counties, which currently have a combined population of around 4.7 million people, predicted that over the next 25 years the region will grow twice as fast as the rest of Southern California.
“I don’t know if it stays in L.A.’s shadow,” Kome Ajse, executive director of the Southern California Association of Governments, told the Southern California News Group. “The Inland Empire will be where the action will be. As the population will be there, the buying power will be there.”
The region’s population surge has dramatically impacted home prices in a region that’s seen plenty of market swings — another study found that over a period of decades the IE ranked as California’s most volatile residential market. In recent years, the surge has created more demand for multifamily development sites.
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