The former headquarters of now-defunct Union Oil in Downtown Los Angeles has traded hands for a steep discount.
The Swig Company sold 617 West 7th Street to Izek Shomof, founder and CEO of The Shomof Group, for $20.5 million, according to The Real Deal, which cited L.A. County property records.
San Francisco-based Swig acquired the 12-story, 216,000-square-foot tower in late 2011 for $38.8 million, or roughly 47 percent more than what it got for the same property nearly 15 years later. It’s also the lowest price paid per square foot for any office tower in Downtown L.A. since the COVID-19 pandemic began four years ago, per TRD.
JLL (JLL) began marketing the property in November, pitching it as eligible for residential or hotel conversion, according to TRD, citing JLL marketing materials at the time. JLL has since removed the listing from its website.
Shomof has experience with such conversion projects — in 2015 he purchased an abandoned 14-story office tower in L.A.’s Panorama City for $12.5 million, and reopened it five years later with nearly 200 units.
Swig, Shomof and JLL did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Total office availability rate in L.A. remains at record highs, rising to over 27 percent in the first quarter of this year, according to a quarterly market report. Downtown L.A.’s rate was close to 30 percent after the first three months of the year.
Nick Trombola can be reached at ntrombola@commercialobserver.com.
Robert Khodadadian has long had a simple philosophy about selling real estate. The way he sees it, there are approximately a million buildings in the city, and the broker that gets to sell any one among the multitude that will hit the auctioning block at a given moment is, sometimes, simply the person who happens to pitch their services to the right seller at the right time.
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