Title: Vice president
Company: Kennedy Wilson Brokerage Group
Project: Handling leasing with partner Lee Shapiro for South Park by Windsor luxury apartments at 939 S. Hill St.
What brought you to this project?
Lee Shapiro and I were engaged by the Hanover Group and GID, who is their equity (provider), to lease the project because we were downtown specialists that had a track record of taking projects that were kind of in the path of progress and successfully leasing them. It’s different to lease projects that are considered main and main properties that are at the corner of the most active blocks, but it’s a whole other thing to lease projects off of the main retail area, which in downtown was Seventh Street between Figueroa and Olive streets. Olympic Boulevard was considered far south then.
What projects prepared you to take on South Park by Windsor and why?
I think in downtown it was 801 and Hope, which was a Wood Partners project, which we started leasing in 2014. It’s about 230-odd apartments. That was a similar situation to the Windsor project in that that block was considered a little bit removed from the most desirable retail projects in downtown. It was a couple of blocks away and we were really selling the future.
What sets this project apart from others in downtown?
It’s a location that is at the border of kind of the Fashion District and South Park. Broadway is kind of the Brooklyn of downtown and Grand Avenue is kind of like the Beverly Hills
of downtown. So this project is at the border. It’s the crossroads between two different districts and so it’s an important project from that standpoint because you get a nice mix of
the rich hipsters combined with the young, suited-up corporate professionals.
What were your biggest challenges with this property?
You had Olympic Boulevard, which at the time was dead. It’s now the 50-yard line of downtown, but a few years ago, when the project first started construction, Olympic Boulevard was kind of the end of the Earth. It’s just tough because there’s a certain group of tenants. A lot of retail tenants are not pioneers. They don’t want to be the first in.
What impact will this property have on downtown?
I think the impact it’s had on South Park is this project created momentum. For us to lease the rest of South Park, the success we had at that project allowed us to convince other tenants to move in next door (where we were leasing at other properties). It’s the downtown domino effect.
