Developer Purchases Hollywood High-Rise
An aging high-rise office building in the heart of Hollywood’s entertainment district has been purchased for $29.5 million by a Phoenix-based developer that plans to convert it to housing, the broker representing the buyer said Friday.
It is the largest office building sold for a residential conversion in Hollywood this year, and evidence that developers are still keen on rebuilding the once-forlorn neighborhood, brokers said.
Alliance Residential Co. bought the 12-story tower at 7060 Hollywood Blvd. from Los Angeles real estate investors Massoud Yashouafar and Ezri Namvar.
The buyer will probably turn the 174,800-square-foot building into condos with shops on the ground floor, said real estate broker Nathan Pellow of Colliers Seeley International Inc., who represented Alliance in the deal.
The new owner hopes to complete the conversion by late 2007, but hasn’t determined the sizes or prices of the units, Pellow said. It plans to call the property Broadstone Hollywood.
The building, completed in 1971, is about 30% occupied and has seen little change in the last decade. Across the street Hollywood-based developer CIM Group Inc. is converting a 1920s office building into 42 apartments.
Other nearby properties -- including the Hollywood & Highland entertainment center, El Capitan theater and Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel -- have had hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of improvements.
The tower at 7060 Hollywood Blvd. is “part of the Hollywood hangover” of older buildings that reflect the neighborhood’s often-shabby recent past, said real estate broker John Tronson of Ramsey-Shilling Co., who was not involved in the deal.
He described the sellers as “momentum players” who bought the building for about $6 million in the late 1990s and turned a substantial profit -- without making major upgrades -- because the neighborhood became popular again. The sellers did not respond to requests for comment.
Alliance is an apartment manager and developer that has built more than 30,000 units, mostly in the West. It has recently moved into condominium construction.
