An office building designed by modernist architect Craig Ellwood and located in El Segundo traded hands at discount, according to Los Angeles County property records dated late December.
AVG Partners, a private equity firm based in Beverly Hills, and Majestic Asset Management, an Agoura Hills-located boutique real estate company, purchased the three-story property at 777 South Aviation Boulevard for $121.5 million, or about $405 a square foot — marking a 28.5 percent loss for the sellers.
Ocean West Capital Partners and Lionstone Investments purchased the real estate pre-pandemic, in 2019, for $170 million, or about $560 per square foot. The duo received $114 million in financing from Suntrust Bank then. Lionstone Investments later shut down and was folded into parent company Ameriprise Financial after ongoing tensions that resulted in its co-founders leaving the company.
Neither buyers nor sellers immediately responded to a request for comment.
In 2016, the Federal Aviation Administration signed a 15-year lease for a 154,000-square-foot space at 777 South Aviation when it was owned by Embarcadero Capital Partners and Westbrook Partners.
El Segundo’s office vacancy rate was 26.4 percent in the third quarter, according to data from CBRE. That’s better than in Downtown Los Angeles — a poster child for post-pandemic office distress — where the vacancy rate was 33.3 percent in the same period.
The Los Angeles Sparks recently announced a plan to build a $150 million, 55,000-square-foot practice facility and headquarters in El Segundo, where five other professional teams have business operations or practice facilities.
The city’s offices have attracted a number of tenants, such as media marketing agency Canvas Worldwide.
But El Segundo also saw Barry Sternlicht’s Starwood surrender office complexes to lenders after falling behind on hundreds of millions of dollars in debt.
Beyond El Segundo, in 2022, Majestic Asset Management purchased an office and industrial property in El Monte from Rising Realty Partners. The 250,000-square-foot complex on Telstar Avenue traded for about $70 million — and earlier that year, the company bought a six-building industrial complex totaling almost 200,000 square feet in Goleta for $51 million.
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