Luxury fashion brand Chrome Hearts, owned by Richard and Laurie Stark, purchased a small Malibu hotel called the Surfrider for $37.5 million to notch one of California’s priciest per-key deals ever, The Real Deal has learned, and the priciest all year.
That comes to about $1.9 million a room, just shy of Qatar-backed Maybourne Hotel Group’s Montage Beverly Hills more than $400 million buy, which set a California record at $2 million per room then.
The oceanfront hotel, a “California beach house,” as it’s called, was owned by Dauntless Capital Partners, according to property records. The Marella Group brokered the deal.
The property, at 23033 Pacific Coast Highway, traded hands for $30 million four years ago; the luxe 20-room hotel has a guest-only rooftop bar and restaurant, faces Surfrider Beach and is near Malibu Pier.
Chrome Hearts chief operating officer Mario Lejtman, who is named in the deed, and Dauntless Capital Partners managing partner Cramer Williams, who signed the deed, did not respond to a request for comment.
This deal is an exception to the general rule of the hotel market these days in Los Angeles, where numerous properties are defaulting on debt, facing foreclosure and a tough sales environment, in part because of the Measure ULA property transfer tax that has resulted in fewer commercial trades. Homelessness in the region is also seen as a factor in a dip in tourism that hurts revenues, while a $30 minimum wage for hotel workers is another factor spooking investors.
Both sides of the Malibu deal have made other buys recently. Chrome Hearts purchased its flagship store property for $40 million in Waikiki, a neighborhood in Honolulu, Hawaii. Dauntless Capital Partners obtained a $34 million loan connected to a D.C. office that is plans to convert to a hotel, and it purchased a Marriott hotel, in the the Washington, D.C. area, too, for $66 million.
Dauntless Capital Partners’ $302 million buy of 150 West 48th Street made it on The Real Deal’s largest commercial sales in New York City in 2023.
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