Investment Group Weighs Sale of 1,600 Topanga Canyon Acres
Laaco Ltd., the investment group that sparked a furor last year when it agreed to sell the Riviera Country Club & Tennis Club to foreign buyers, announced Friday that it may sell about 1,600 acres that it owns overlooking the Pacific Ocean at Topanga Canyon Boulevard.
Laaco said in a statement that it is “exploring” a possible sale or joint-venture development of the land with “various potential buyers or partners.” Talks are at a “very early stage,” the partnership said, “and no agreements have been reached.”
Company officials declined to identify the possible buyers or estimate a minimum price for the property. They said the talks were revealed to comply with disclosure requirements of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Laaco is a publicly traded partnership whose trophy properties are the downtown Los Angeles Athletic Club and the California Yacht Club in Marina del Rey. It has several hundred investors.
Just last Sunday, Laaco completed final sale of the Riviera, a Los Angeles landmark that was once a favorite haunt of early Hollywood film stars, to a Japanese real estate company known as Marukin Shoji.
The sale proved so controversial that it was done in two stages over a year’s time to make the transaction more palatable to Riviera members. The sale price for the 168-acre property, located in Pacific Palisades, was $108 million.
A sale of the Topanga property, which is mostly undeveloped, may prove equally controversial. Any major new development is likely to draw the anger of residents of Topanga Canyon, a laid-back community nestled in the mountains several miles up the road from Pacific Coast Highway.
“I’m sure the local people would be opposed to a development of any kind, in part because of the increased traffic congestion,” said Hap Holmwood, broker in charge of the Century 21 office in Topanga Canyon.
“There is going to be a great deal of scrutiny on this,” added Peter Ireland, an aide to Los Angeles County Supervisor Deane Dana.
Holmwood said it is impossible to estimate what the land is worth because it is not clear how extensively it could be developed. Located in an unincorporated part of Los Angeles County, the property is also under the jurisdiction of the California Coastal Commission.
The property, which runs along Pacific Coast Highway and straddles picturesque Topanga Canyon Boulevard, presently contains several roadside businesses as well as aging wooden cabins inhabited by renters. But, as Laaco noted in its statement, most of the property “may not be usable” because of its “rugged terrain.”
The Laaco investors have been been exploring ways to develop or sell the property for decades. They sold a large tract of land in 1956 for what is now the Sunset Mesa housing development, and sold a 1.1-mile strip of Topanga Beach to the state of California in 1973 for $6 million.
Laaco, whose roots in California go back to 1880, first purchased a minority interest in the Topanga property in the mid 1920s. The remaining interest, owned by corporations controlled by newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, was acquired nearly 20 years later.
