A nearly 15-acre parcel of land that has served as the campus of William Carey International University in Pasadena for 40 years is up for sale.
The unusually large land offering comes in a long-established residential area surrounded largely by single-family homes.
The WCIU-owned property, with an address of 1539 E. Howard St., was purchased around the time of the university’s founding in 1977. It also includes 12 academic and administrative buildings, and 143 housing units, including single-family homes, duplexes and triplexes.
About 50 homes and a few vacant lots are included in the deal currently on offer. A nearby soccer field also is being included in the sale, which could include part of all of the 14.8 acres being offered.
Up to 80 units used for housing staff and ministry partners aren’t for sale.
The university hopes another faith-based organization will buy part or all of the property, and it is marketing the offering to the sector. Some real estate brokers have estimated the land value upwards of $40 million, with the buildings adding to the price.
“We’ve had quite a bit of interest from other campus users, mission organizations and the private sector,” said Keith Mathias, a broker at the Ventura-based RK Capital Real Estate Group, who is handling the sale.
“We’ve gotten offers that are not quite up to par,” Mathias said, but wouldn’t disclose the asking price or offers. “We expect a few more offers to come in in the future.”
Transitioning education
The parcel of land has been an island of Christian education since it was first occupied by Pasadena Nazarene College starting in 1910, before the college changed its name to Point Loma Nazarene University and moved to San Diego.
WCIU bought the property around the time Presbyterian missionary Ralph Winter founded the institution in 1977. Winter also founded a sister organization, the U.S. Center for World Mission, an interdenominational religious outreach group, in 1976. It since has been rebranded as Frontier Ventures, and also shares space near the Pasadena campus.
Time magazine in 2005 named Winter as one of the nation’s 25 most influential evangelicals.
Winter named the school he founded for William Carey, an influential English Baptist missionary who spent much of his life preaching in India the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Winter died in 2009 at age 84, and WCIU has since been scaling back its on-site educational programs, and transitioned to offering online education. Online education accounted for the entire enrollment of 66 students, according to the school’s 2016 annual report.
WCIU no longer has a presence on the campus and currently leases the facilities to other faith-based groups, including Providence Christian College.
Kevin Higgins, WCIU president since August 2017, said talk among university officials about selling the property had been off and on for about a decade, but took on a greater urgency during the last two or three years.
“It’s not the most strategic resource for achieving what we want to achieve,” he said of the property.
The university’s core curriculum is a master’s program in international development – it has curtailed its bachelor’s and Ph.D. programs in recent years.
WCIU and Frontier Ventures won’t entirely exit the city, however, maintaining offices on campus, he added.
The school entered into a non-binding agreement with a faith-based organization for the property, Higgins said, but the deal expired because the other side couldn’t get all the legal arrangements together in time.
“We don’t know exactly what we’ll sell,” Higgins said. “It will depend on buyers and what they want.”
Higgins said selling off most of the property is the best use of WCIU’s resources and that the school needs to reduce overhead costs, including for maintenance and cafeteria workers who are employed by the school.
His hope is those workers will be able to keep their jobs after the sale, he added.
Potential value
There aren’t many comparisons on sales of college campuses – the WCIU property is smaller than Ambassador College, located off Orange Grove Boulevard and about five miles southwest of WCIU, closer to Old Town Pasadena.
Ambassador College closed in 1990 and the campus was sold off in parcels, including a 13-acre section that was bought by Harvest Rock Church and Marantha High School. Another 10-acre portion sold in 2019 for $15 million to New York-based Fortress Investment Group.
Pasadena-based realtor Paula Walker with Pacific Union International is not involved with WCIU’s campus proposal sale but made an educated guess as to the value.
“Off the top of my head, I’d say $40 million,” Walker said.
The property isn’t zoned for single-family and multi-unit development, she noted, and it would be a lot of work to get approvals and permits from the city.
The for-sale status has led to opposition in some quarters of the school’s alumni, including Save the Campus & Historic World Mission Inc., which has criticized the proposal sale as being antithetical to Winter’s principles.
