Santa Monica-based Sherwood Real Estate Partners has acquired the original office and airport hangar of Jack Northrop, aviation entrepreneur and founder of defense manufacturer Northrop Corp., through a bankruptcy proceeding.
The 38,000-square-foot hangar is located at 3507 Jack Northrop Ave. at the Hawthorne Municipal Airport.
Sherwood Real Estate Partners, along with capital partner San Francisco-based asset management firm Farallon Capital Management LLC and operational partner Illinois-based investment management firm Urban Investment Research Corp., bought the industrial property for $13.4 million. Farallon provided funds for the all-cash transaction.
“There are a lot of complexities when purchasing real estate through bankruptcy,” said Andrew Kirsh, co-chairman and head of the real estate department at Sklar Kirsh LLP, the firm that represented Sherwood in the bankruptcy proceedings.
“Given our expertise in navigating through the bankruptcy process, we were able to successfully represent Sherwood from the stalking horse process all the way through acquisition closing while working closely with the trustee and fending off challenges that the debtor and other parties initiated,” Kirsh said.
The purchase of the hangar marks Sherwood’s first acquisition in the South Bay, as well as the firm’s first bankruptcy acquisition in more than a decade – since the global financial crisis of 2008.
The transaction is an example of fee-simple ownership – a real estate term used to describe a landowner’s complete and total ownership of land and all the properties on it.
Beyond the 20,000-square-foot hangar, the asset includes 6,000 square feet of office space, 4,000 square feet of terminal space and an 8,000-square-foot R&D building.
Sherwood plans to reposition the property and lease it out to a fleet operator.
The airport was first constructed in 1941 when the city of Hawthorne built a dirt airstrip to entice Northrop to move to Los Angeles. In the 1950s, Northrop deeded its share of the property to the city but continued to use it under a lease-back agreement.
It sits adjacent to the headquarters of some of the biggest aerospace and technology names in the game, including SpaceX, Starlink and the Tesla Design Center.
