Who would want the Montrose, a West Hollywood hotel just steps from Sunset Strip? Pebblebrook Hotel Trust was sort of shopping the 133-all-suite hotel, but after tourism fell off a cliff, revenues flatlined and costs skyrocketed, wildfires tore through parts of Los Angeles, federal agents launched immigration raids, Angelenos flooded the streets in protest and the National Guard arrived, the appeal was not obvious.
The real estate investment trust’s chief executive and chairman, Jon Bortz, had told shareholders that the company would be selling hotels and buying back its stock; he once mentioned to The Real Deal that he wouldn’t buy another hotel in the area, ever.
“L.A. is a difficult market to sell in today,” Bortz later said. Los Angeles hoteliers have been defaulting on debt and facing forced handoffs since the pandemic.
Yet in December, the chic WeHo hotel with a rock-’n’-roll vibe found a new owner. Pebblebrook sold the Montrose for more than $44 million, or about $333,000 per key. It was a bargain, considering a Malibu sale that had just set an almost $2 million-a-room record or the $670,000-per-key the SLS Beverly Hills minutes away could command.
The buyer was a high-net-worth individual with roots in L.A., a taste for discounted real estate, and a belief in Los Angeles’ future, a source familiar said at the time — enough belief to overlook SoCal hotel distress. His name, records revealed: Daniel Negari.
This is not Negari’s first property play. He made a name for himself buying and selling digital real estate, picking up top-level domain names and renting the domains within. Over the past two decades, and more frequently in the past few years, he’s also invested in physical property. He considers real and digital part of a unified business model. “I build platforms and I buy and improve assets,” he wrote. “Sometimes those assets are digital, sometimes they are physical, but the common thread is long-term ownership and execution.” He has amped up the real-world buying recently, shopping especially in distressed downtowns where commercial giants, including the country’s richest developer, Donald Bren, are making their exits.
Negari has now invested hundreds of millions of dollars in a portfolio of offices, shops, restaurants, apartments and now the WeHo hotel. His holdings concentrate in downtown Santa Monica, where he has more than 350,000 square feet of retail and office space, plus about 150 apartments, according to CoStar, even though others have given up on a revival of the district’s once-thriving Third Street Promenade.
He owns retail and commercial in Las Vegas, multifamily in Beverly Hills and Venice and student housing near University of California Los Angeles, University of Southern California and Santa Monica College, according to his website. He bought two discounted office buildings from Bren’s Irvine Company in San Diego in late 2024 and 2025 and has plans to develop a hotel in Santa Monica.
Individual investors have their reasons — timing, local insight, gut feeling and less pressure on the exit — why they go one way when institutional money goes the other, and Negari’s holdings, taken together, seem to have a thesis, though he declined to clarify it in a phone or in-person interview.
Another source familiar with the WeHo deal called Negari, who lives in Las Vegas, a contrarian investor and believes he is timing the California market well.
But the source suspects there was an emotional reason behind the Montrose acquisition: Negari cares about the places he invests in. He doesn’t buy when things are easy and sell when they’re hard. “These are not abstract markets to me,” Negari said in an email. “They are home.”
Real property
Negari’s career in digital real estate gives a sense of how he operates in the physical world, trusting his gut and looking for bargains. He owns an array of three-letter domain extensions, which are alternatives to .com and .org. In his portfolio are .baby, .car and .rent, among others.
In 2012, he picked up .xyz for $185,000. You end the alphabet with “x, y, z,” so you should end domain names the same way, he’d always thought.
Three years later, Google changed its parent company name to Alphabet and launched at abc.xyz.
“Negari is the web equivalent of a real estate developer, and Google had just moved into Negari’s digital condominium building,” a Jezebel staff writer explained at the time. Hundreds of domain names were soon registered at .xyz every minute. Tech outlets profiled him, depicting him as the winner of Google’s rebrand and restructure. “Boom!” he posted on Twitter. Of top-level domains, .xyz is still No. 1, with more than 10 million domains registered, or 22 percent of the new domain market, according to an industry data platform.
Negari, who was born in Santa Monica to parents who’d emigrated from Iran and grew up in Beverly Hills, started messing around on the web in the ’90s. By age 12, he was spending hours searching for domain names and extensions, he blogged. Not long after, he had a different kind of formative experience. In his teens, he was home alone when the family house was burgled. It was after his bar mitzvah, where he’d received about $100,000 in gifts. Everything was stolen.
“Real estate is my art form and 225 [Broadway] is one of those projects that can genuinely change the energy of its neighborhood.”
“I decided to live my life like there was no tomorrow,” he said in a 2013 interview with the Domain Industry News Magazine. Nothing scared him after that, and he figured out how to calculate his risks and hedge his bets. “Thankfully, most of my risks have paid off in spades.”
He was exposed to the real estate industry young. His mother was a banker who handled real estate loans, and he once taught a broker how to use computers in exchange for lessons on the mortgage business. Later, after graduating from the University of Southern California, he started his own brokerage, Beverly Hills Mint, with his mom, in 2006. It still appears to be in business after Negari sold his stake to his mother.
Los Angeles appeals to him for its diversity, creativity, ambition, energy and weather, he said. Plus, he said it is a place that rewards people who show up and do the work. To him that means helping streets and districts come back to life — his craft. “It seems everyone else has run away from L.A.,” he said. As a resident, that includes him. In 2011, he moved to Las Vegas because he was spending a few months a year there for conferences and business and it was a practical homebase, he said.
It’s unclear what kind of wealth Negari amassed from his real estate investments or the domain-name business. There are some rumors about Negari’s techniques in the domain world, but the only substantiated one is about consumer data; he and other defendants paid $1.5 million to settle a Federal Trade Commission complaint. He declined to comment on that.
He made SoCal real estate buys while building his technology business, but in the last decade, he seems to have really taken the funds offline and doubled down on property in the region. Early on, he was buying small residential properties that he’d flip and rent out. His first commercial purchase was an office building in Beverly Hills in 2007.
In 2023, Negari tried to buy a publicly traded subsidiary of CIM Group called Creative Media & Community Trust, a big swing for a small timer. Still, he was the second-largest shareholder, and his offer was valued at about $200 million. “Shaul Kuba and CIM Group have built one of the most admirable organizations in the world,” he wrote in an offer letter. “However, I believe they have made costly capital allocation blunders that have starved shareholders of hundreds of millions of dollars and failed to create shareholder value.” In another, he called the three principals the “Godfathers.”
Negari dismisses the idea that it was an outsize play. “In the last several years, I have successfully completed the acquisition of hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of commercial and multifamily real estate with no outside equity partners,” he wrote.
The CIM board of directors rejected his offer because they believed it undervalued the company and claimed he didn’t have committed financing. Negari hasn’t spoken to Kuba or the other principals, Avi Shemesh and Richard Ressler, since, he said.
Difficult situations
The Montrose deal began with a mutual: a connection of Negari’s and Pebblebrook’s called the REIT about selling a hotel in downtown San Diego, where he owns office properties, according to a person familiar with the deal. Negari said he preferred to purchase in Los Angeles, since it would be his first hotel, and L.A. is what he knows. They walked through some of Pebblebrook’s properties in the area and agreed on the Montrose.
After that, the deal was straightforward, the source said. They had calls. Pebblebrook checked references, which came back that he was under the radar but could hold his own, the source said. After that, “he did everything he said he would do,” the source said. Though he has a team, Negari is the face of the business. He looks for the path of least resistance rather than making a sport of negotiation.
His other recent purchases fit into that contrarian playbook.
Vacant storefronts have plagued the three-block outdoor mall on Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade, at the heart of the beachfront city’s downtown, for years, especially after looting during 2020’s George Floyd riots. Today, the Johnny Rockets is shuttered, as are the Gap and nearby REI. When REI left its spot at 402 Santa Monica Boulevard, it blamed the cost of doing business and a changed operating environment; no one has moved in. Meanwhile, the streets have become a gathering place for homeless people. Not even the Apple store was bustling one sunny afternoon. A recent update to the local alcohol policy — pedestrians can buy alcohol from businesses and drink outside — might not even revive the district, and owners are still missing payments and losing properties. PIMCO and Witkoff defaulted on a $400 million loan tied to a luxury apartment complex, and Rockwood Capital’s Santa Monica Clock Tower fell into the hands of a receiver.
This is Negari’s beach.
“I like difficult, misunderstood situations,” he wrote, “where you can create value with vision and execution. I have been known to run into the fire, not away from it.”
Put another way, he “almost seeks to be bargain shopping in the luxury aisle,” one insider said. It’s like he can see what Santa Monica used to be — the spot for L.A’s beachy, carefree crowd — and how it could come back.
In 2018, when Negari started buying here, retail had already hit hard times. National chains edged out local purveyors and then, thanks to rent hikes and reduced foot traffic, closed, leaving large vacancies.
That year, Negari picked up 310 Wilshire, a 1920s Spanish Colonial Revival-style two-story designed by Los Angeles architect Paul Revere Williams. Negari restored the original textured facade and cream color scheme. He transformed the second floor to a creative office space and landed a Danish architecture studio as a marquee tenant. Though he kept the ground-floor restaurant space on the palm-tree-lined street, it later became a pandemic casualty. An Italian spot could soon open, he said.
The mixed result didn’t stop him from purchasing seven parcels in 2024 on Third Street Promenade for $84.5 million from Federal Realty Investment Trust, where Pebblebrook’s CEO was once on the board of trustees. In that case, Negari took a loan of about $61 million from the Royal Bank of Canada. Some properties are occupied, including a historic late 1940s Art Deco Building; Cabo Cantina and Casa Martin are bar and restaurant tenants. Others are still being marketed.
The vacancies have yielded discounts.
Late last year, Negari bought 402 Santa Monica Boulevard, REI’s old space, paying $16 million, half its previous price. Because of the good price, Negari may be able to lower the rent and draw a tenant, said Vince Muselli, who was involved in the leasing of the property. Negari said he is in active negotiations with more than one potential tenant. “I do not want to get ahead of signed paper, but the interest level is strong,” he said.
His latest buy is where the Gap used to be, at 1355 Third Street Promenade, a victim of the retailer’s closures announced in 2020. He paid $17 million for the vacant spot. Negari is now marketing the four-story, off-white building with blue awnings that hasn’t had a tenant for years as an excellent flagship location; videos from his team show a gutted fourth floor with a red-brick interior.
He’s not the only one imagining a comeback. The insider agrees that Negari’s “purchases in Santa Monica and San Diego will anchor and elevate the markets.”
And, until recently, Negari’s mother, Berta, was on the board of Downtown Santa Monica, an economic growth nonprofit. But the Santa Monica City Council, which appoints six members of the board, recently ousted her and others, including Leo Pustilnikov, who owns real estate in the neighborhood, for being too skewed toward Third Street Promenade property and business owners. Pustilnikov and another member of the board are now suing the city over their removals.
An art form
Negari’s play for former Irvine Company buildings in San Diego yielded his favorite deal ever, 225 Broadway, an office building with a luxury bent: access to a wellness club with a hot tub and sauna, plus a bar. The coastal sun fills the floor-to-ceiling windows.
“Real estate is my art form and 225 is one of those projects that can genuinely change the energy of its neighborhood,” Negari said.
He picked up the building for $48 million, along with 501 West Broadway for $69 million, all in cash. Their price tags were less than what Bren paid. Negari later placed debt on both assets.
In downtown San Diego, offices have a 26 percent vacancy rate. But Negari defends his buildings, just like he stands up for Santa Monica. This is a one-of-a-kind market, he said, and office isn’t dead — tenants just want quality. He models 90 percent-plus occupancy by the end of this year and released news of three leases signed in a single day for the two offices. “I would not be surprised if we end up with a waitlist as people continue to return to office and come to the best projects in the market. When you combine strong buildings, disciplined execution and a city that is finally turning the corner, activity comes back fast,” Negari said.
Knowing the power of the internet, he’s become a de facto influencer for his neighborhoods, frequently posting events, zoning changes and more happening in downtown Santa Monica and speaking at a conference in downtown San Diego.
Negari sees himself as someone who obsesses over details and execution and who cares about more than the money, a steward of good things who’s busy “preserving culture, improving communities, and building something durable for the next generation,” as he wrote.
Still, Negari prefers life behind the curtain, he said — the top-level domain owner, not the website publisher. Negari repeatedly expressed by email that he is a private person who wants to keep a low profile. “I am not trying to be the story,” Negari wrote. “If the projects perform and the neighborhoods improve, that is the win. Everything else is noise.”