Hager Pacific, whose principals maintain offices in LA and Orange counties, acquired the 15-year-old mall from Pan Pacific Retail Properties Inc. of Vista, near San Diego, in what Pan Pacific describes as a disposition of non-core assets.

Hager Pacific acquired the mall, which is 96% leased and occupies a 42.8-acre parcel at the intersection of Crenshaw and Martin Luther King boulevards, as part of a transaction in which a related entity of Hager Pacific sold the 231,000-sf Del Norte Plaza Shopping Center in Escondido to Pan Pacific for $33 million. Reza Etedali of Reza Investment Group at Sperry Van Ness in Newport Beach represented all parties in both transactions.

The Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza Mall is one of the largest enclosed regional malls in Los Angeles and home to the first three-story Wal-Mart store in the country. The Wal-Mart store opened in January to record sales of approximately 40% above expectations, according to Hager Pacific, which notes that the location is a non-traditional store for Wal-Mart because it retrofitted an existing store instead of starting from scratch. The store previously was a Broadway department store that had been vacant for nearly four years.

The mall also is home to a 15-screen Magic Johnson Theater, which opened in 1995, Robinsons-May, Sears and Albertsons stores. In addition, more than 100 specialty stores occupy mall spaces, many of which are nationwide chains. The mall, with a large food court, is known as a community center for the Baldwin Hills area. It also hosts the annual Pan African Film and Arts Festival, which draws more than 100,000 visitors each year, as well as an annual Martin Luther King Jr. parade and other community events.

When completed in 1988, the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza Mall was the first project undertaken by the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency. In 1995, the redevelopment agency added the first Magic Johnson Theaters in the nation to the roster.

As part of the acquisition, Hager Pacific Properties assumed the existing $30 million of industrial revenue bond financing originally funded via the redevelopment agency. The agency is now working on three additional redevelopment projects within the Crenshaw area, including the $123-million Marlton Square Project located immediately west of themall. Hager has hired the Festival Cos. of Los Angeles to manage the mall.

Hager Pacific Properties recently made headlines for its acquisition, as reported by GlobeSt.com, of a 488,817-sf warehouse and distribution center, formerly occupied by Heilig-Meyers, in Hesperia. Headed by David Hager, Adam Milstein and Robert Neal, Hager Pacific and its related entities own and manage about eight million sf of industrial and commercial property and about 3,000 apartment units throughout Southern California.

Seller Pan Pacific, a shopping center REIT, acquired the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza Mall in January with the acquisition of Manhattan Beach, CA-based Center Trust. Pan Pacific considered it to be a non-core asset because it focuses on grocery-anchored, neighborhood and community shopping centers not regional malls. Pan Pacific owns 135 properties encompassing about 21.5 million sf of retail space, principally in California, Washington, Oregon and Nevada.