Mall Makeover Has Little Room for Korean Shops

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As developers continue to descend upon Koreatown, betting on the area as a hot residential market, the neighborhood is set to lose many Korean businesses to the redevelopment process.

More than a dozen will vacate when the area’s most well-known mall, which consists entirely of Korean retailers and restaurants, is redeveloped.

Mid-Wilshire developer Harridge Development Group purchased the Wilshire Galleria last month for $49 million. It paid $353 a square foot for the 138,000-square-foot retail building on 2.1 acres of land at 3240 Wilshire Blvd. to seller Han Kook Property Management Co., which has its office inside the property.

Harridge is considering several mixed-use redevelopment ideas, said Chief Executive David Schwartzman. He said the firm has discussed a multifamily-focused complex as well as one with both hotel and residential units.

The Galleria is roughly 50 percent occupied, mostly by retailers such as Tom Tom’s Coffee, which are on short-term leases, with the exception of Nature Spa, which has a longer-term deal that Harridge will build around. All other tenants will have to vacate, with the exception of the spa, when their leases end in 2017, Schwartzman said.

He stressed that Harridge’s reuse plan will maintain the historic character of the all-marble former I. Magnin department store building, which was designed by esteemed architect Myron Hunt in the late 1930s. I. Magnin closed in 1993, due to the downturn and the 1992 riots, which resulted in $10 million worth of damage to the store and steered customers away. The Koreatown Galleria opened soon after.

“The building is a masterpiece,” Schwartzman said, citing the vibrancy of Koreatown, the most densely populated district of Los Angeles, as another reason for Harridge’s interest.

The firm is also building a recently approved mixed-use project that includes 100 small-lot homes in Frogtown, and submitted plans in May for a massive redevelopment of the Crossroads of the World site in Hollywood.

Johnny Choi of CBRE Group Inc. as well as Curtis Palmer and Anthony Muhlstein of Newmark Grubb Knight Frank represented the buyer and the seller in the Galleria transaction.

Broker Profile

Real estate is in the blood of Mike Condon Jr., 32, an associate at the downtown L.A. office of Jones Lang LaSalle Inc. – and yet he avoided the family profession for as long as possible.

After college, he involved himself in other pursuits such as get-rich-quick Internet startups and even worked at a Guess Inc. store in the South Bay Galleria selling jeans.

When the broker was growing up, his father, Mike Condon, was a successful executive in the South Bay office of Colliers International, while his uncle, Tom Condon, worked out of Colliers’ Central L.A. outpost. His mother, Suzanne Condon, was a broker for Coldwell Banker. So it’s perhaps not surprising that for a while, Condon said he was interested in anything except real estate.

But after several years of dabbling in startups, he realized the odds of becoming an overnight millionaire weren’t in his favor.

“It was basically an overnight epiphany that I needed to accept the fact that I had to be a grunt for a while,” he said. “I realized my talents are built for real estate.”

He began working for JLL during the last year of his M.B.A. program at Loyola Marymount University.

Starting with industrial deals in the South Bay, Condon moved on to reuse deals downtown, where he lives and dines out frequently with his girlfriend, Collyn Kalunian, who works for Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, of Hawthorne.

“We have a reservation at Otium tomorrow,” he said in a recent interview.

Despite his early resistance to the family game, he now sometimes teams up on deals with his dad, who began working for JLL in 2011, and outsources cold calling to his mother.

“She’s like a dog with a bone,” he said. “If she can’t do it, no one can.”

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Archway Holdings Corp. has sold 9033 Wilshire Blvd., a 50,000-square-foot office building, to a company controlled by a UBS Financial Services Inc.-affiliated entity for $75 million, or $1,500 a square foot. The property was purchased in August 2008 for only $500 a square foot. Archway Holdings Corp. spent roughly $10 million upgrading the medical building. Julie Hoffman and Michael McFadden of Allen Matkins Leck Gamble Mallory & Natsis represented the seller in the deal. Bob Bickford and Stacey Daniel of Kelley Drye White Oconnor represented the buyer. Stephen Somer of Eastdil Secured was the broker for both sides of the deal.

Staff reporter Hannah Miet can be reached at [email protected] or (323) 549-5225, ext. 228.

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