Jamison, Arc Capital to Convert Koreatown Offices Into Homes

For Jamison Services, 10 may be the magic number for Los Angeles office-to-home conversions, with its latest project set for Koreatown.

The Koreatown-based developer and Downtown-based Arc Capital Partners announced plans to turn a 13-story office building at 3325 Wilshire Boulevard into 236 homes, the Commercial Observer and Urbanize Los Angeles reported.

Jamison bought the 233,000-square-foot building in 2005 for $15 million, or $64 per square foot.

Plans now call for converting the Mid-Century offices, built in 1956, into 236 studio, one- and two-bedroom apartments atop 15,000 square feet of ground-floor shops and restaurants.

A parking garage for 450 cars would be retained.

Garrett Lee, president of parent company Jamison Properties, said the conversion of 3325 Wilshire is the company’s 10th adaptive reuse project to date. Along with ground-up development, those projects have delivered 6,000 units, with another 2,000 in the pipeline, Lee said in a statement.

The office-to-home conversion is designed by Koreatown-based Corbel Architects, with Donaldson + Partners, based in Culver City, redesigning the interior.

The converted building would include a gym, coworking office, screening room, golf simulator and an outdoor deck.

Funding for the project includes $60 million in taxable multifamily housing revenue bonds from Western Alliance and First Hawaiian Bank.

Residents are expected to move into the apartments in the next 18 to 24 months, according to Jamison. The cost of the conversion, and when it was approved by the city, were not disclosed.

“There simply is not enough housing in Los Angeles to meet the demand, especially in Koreatown, as new residents from other parts of L.A. see the value in living in a 24/7 live-work-play environment in the heart of the city,” Jaime Lee, CEO of Jamison Properties, said in a statement.

Koreatown is among the most densely populated neighborhoods in Los Angeles, with 110,000 people living within three square miles, according to Jamison, citing housing figures. Some 91 percent of its residents rent.

For the past dozen years, the company founded by Dr. David Lee has been a Los Angeles leader in converting the city’s older workplaces into homes — turning 1.4 million square feet of offices into 1,200 apartments.

Such conversions now make up 20 percent of the Jamison portfolio.

Although not an adaptive reuse project, Jamison won approval from the Los Angeles City Council last month for two 26-story, mixed-use buildings at 3600 Wilshire Boulevard in Koreatown, to replace a parking garage, according to the Observer. Plans call for 760 apartments and 6,400 square feet of shops and restaurants.

Two years ago, Rand Corporation identified 2,300 underused office and hotel properties in Los Angeles County that could be converted to housing. Most of them are older office buildings with big chunks of unrented space, according to a study by the think tank.

If all the underused buildings were turned into homes it would add up to 113,000 units, Rand said. That’s between 9 percent and 14 percent of the housing needed to meet demand by 2030.

Office-to-home conversions now dominate adaptive reuse projects across the Golden State, with Los Angeles poised to become the nation’s top commercial-to-residential conversion hotspot.

— Dana Bartholomew