DSB Properties Revealed as Buyer of Malibu Shopping Center

A local shopping center owner is behind the purchase of Malibu’s The Park at Cross Creek, which traded for $80 million earlier this summer.

The retail center at 23401 Civic Center Way was developed by Steve Soboroff’s Soboroff Partners and the Gerschel family; it traded in late June to a then-undisclosed buyer. The 39,350-square-foot neighborhood center anchored by a Whole Foods Market boasted 100 percent occupancy and a 4.5 percent cap rate at the time of the deal.

David Blatt, the head of Van Nuys-based shopping center owner DSB Properties, financed the deal through a $25 million loan from City National Bank, according to now-available loan documents.

The retail center’s ownership is a tenant-in-common structure with two LLCs tied to Blatt under the same headquarters address of The Park at Cross Creek’s property management firm PacificWest Asset Management, according to property records.

Costa Mesa-based PacificWest’s portfolio of managed properties includes retail, office and industrial totaling 12 million square feet, according to the company’s website.

The Park at Cross Creek is another notch in the belt of Blatt’s DSB Properties, which The Real Deal earlier reported as owning about a dozen retail centers throughout Southern California.

The Malibu shopping center made its debut in 2019 after a long entitlement process. Plans for the project initially faced pushback from some in the beachside city looking to uphold a ballot measure limiting chains and large-scale developments. In fact, the process took so long, the original lease Whole Foods inked at The Park at Cross Creek expired before the store actually opened, Soboroff told TRD at the time of the property’s sale.

Other tenants currently at the center include a Blue Bottle Coffee, Barefoot Dreams and Howdy’s Sonrisa Café, in addition to a park area and an event space.