-Broad Green Pictures signed a deal for 36,000 square feet at 959 Seward St. with landlord and developer J.H. Snyder Co. It is the first company to lease space in the project, which is expected to open in August.
-Media firm Buzzfeed agreed to temporarily lease 22,000 square feet at Kilroy Realty Corp.’s Sunset Media Center. The building, at 6255 W. Sunset Blvd., has asking rates of about $4.05 a square foot, which would value the lease at more than $1 million a year.
-Sunshine Smoothie, a smoothie and juice company, bought a 1,125-square-foot retail building it occupied at 6848 W. Sunset Blvd. for $1.1 million from the Pleis family. At $956 a square foot, it’s one of the highest sales prices in Hollywood.
-Musicians Institute leased the former Mark Twain Hotel for 10 years from owner 1150 Wilcox Owner. The school plans to use the 19,000-square-foot facility, at 1622 Wilcox Ave., to add more student housing to its inventory. The deal is valued at more than $7.5 million.
-SSV Properties of El Segundo sold a half-acre site at 6230 Yucca St. for $10.5 million, or $466 a square foot, in an off-market transaction in April. The buyer, residential developer Related California, plans to build an 18-story apartment tower with ground-floor retail.
Continued interest and activity in Hollywood made it the tightest office submarket in Los Angeles County last quarter.
Its vacancy rate fell 1.3 points to 12.7 percent – the lowest in the county – as tenants took 29,479 square feet off the market in the quarter ended June 30, according to data compiled by Jones Lang LaSalle Inc.
“We aren’t seeing a tremendous volume of transactions but the ones we are seeing are relatively significant,” said John Tronson, a principal at Avison Young in Hollywood.
Among them, Broad Green Pictures, billionaire Gabriel Hammond and brother Daniel’s feature film production, financing and distributing company, signed a lease for 36,000 square feet at a 959 Seward St. J.H. Snyder Co. is building the $138 million, 245,000-square-foot two-building creative campus, which is slated to open next month.
Broad Green, which financed and produced Ben Kingsley’s “Learning to Drive,” had been leasing about 10,000 square feet at Hollywood Center Studios and other locations in the neighborhood but needed permanent space to accommodate its expanding business. Terms of the 10-year deal were not disclosed.
Down the road, Buzzfeed inked a deal for 22,000 at Sunset Media Center, 6255 W. Sunset Blvd., with landlord Kilroy Realty Corp. The New York media company, which is expanding quickly, leased the space temporarily while it looks for a long-term, 200,000-square-foot facility. Terms were not disclosed.
Not surprisingly, landlords pushed Class A asking rates up 5 cents to $3.91 a square foot. At some projects, it’s even higher.
“We have raised rents by 25 to 50 cents every six months – or faster than that,” said Nicole Mihalka, senior vice president at JLL in Hollywood. “We are doing deals about $4 a square foot and tenants are still coming.”
Sales continued to hit jaw-dropping figures as well. A 1,125-square-foot retail building at 6848 Sunset sold for more than $956 a square foot, for a total of $1.1 million. Owners of existing tenants Sunshine Smoothie and DRNK Coffee and Tea bought the building and plan to continue to operate it as a café.
Land also remains among the hottest commodities. A half-acre site at 6230 W. Yucca St. sold for $10.5 million in April to residential developer Related California. The firm, which bought the property from El Segundo’s SSV Properties, plans to build an 18-story apartment tower with ground-floor shops.
It’s another indication Hollywood is still the development capital of the county right now.
“I can’t remember in 20 years when I’ve seen so many cranes in the air,” said Mike Arnold, Newmark Grubb Knight Frank executive vice president.
The more than 1.1 million square feet under construction in the submarket include Kilroy’s $400 million, 685,000-square-foot Columbia Square mixed-use project as well as a $300 million mixed Academy Square site and Hudson Pacific Properties Inc.’s 14-story office tower, known as the Icon, next to its studio lots.
Office isn’t the only type of development either.
“The hottest aspect of the market right now is hotel development,” Tronson said. “There will be a lot of hotel rooms hitting Hollywood in the next 24 months. Most start construction in the next six months. It will add over 1,000 rooms and transform this market.”
– Jacquelyn Ryan
