Two office buildings in Malibu Professional Park have sold for a combined $17.5 million.
The buildings, at 23805 and 23815 Stuart Ranch Road, have a total of nearly 40,000 square feet.
Beitler Commercial Realty Services’ Tony Dorn and Newmark Knight Frank’s A.J. Dorn represented the seller, Miramar Property Investment Co. The two are also the leasing agents of the property.
The buyer was Wave Enterprises, a charitable entity of Pepperdine University, which already has space at the property.
“Malibu Professional Park is the largest privately owned office campus in Malibu and benefits from its convenient location and proximity to Malibu’s finest restaurants and shopping,” A.J. Dorn said in a statement. “As an existing tenant at the property, Pepperdine is the ideal owner for the project long term.”
The buildings were 85% leased at the time of the sale. Other tenants include UCLA Medical and additional office and medical tenants.
“Given the very limited amount of quality office space and high-barrier-to-entry market in Malibu, the buyer has the opportunity to make this one of the most premier office parks in the region,” Tony Dorn said in a statement.
Malibu Professional Park is one of only two commercial real estate sales in Malibu so far this year, according to data from CoStar Group Inc.
Zumirez Commercial purchased a roughly 1,500-square-foot office building at 28700 Pacific Coast Highway from Wildlife Malibu for $2.8 million in March.
There were no commercial real estate sales of more than $3 million in Malibu in 2019, CoStar data shows.
In 2018, there were two large land sales of more than $35 million each. That same year, the Center at Carbon Beach, a roughly 20,000-square-foot office building at 22601 Pacific Coast Highway, sold for $21.4 million.
The Malibu office market has about 431,000 square feet of space. The vacancy rate in the market is 11.2%, and the asking rate is $6.14 per square foot, according to Jones Lang LaSalle Inc.
“The office market in Malibu is a micro market,” said JLL Executive Vice President Daniel Rainer. “It’s ancillary to a prolific housing community almost as an amenity versus a necessity. The office market there, you don’t have a lot of companies that need to be in Malibu for recruiting employees, dense amenities — it’s 20 miles away from downtown Santa Monica. The business culture and profile is different than Los Angeles County or Westside L.A.”
Rainer said, in “the last decade there hasn’t been a ton of trading volume.”
Malibu, he added, has a mix of generational and institutional owners.
Most Malibu tenants, he said, are individuals wanting to work near home rather than big companies, which makes the market’s hefty leasing price tag a deterrent to some.
