ONTARIO, CA-Developer Oliver McMillan of San Diego has acquired a 40-acre site in the historic Guasti area here for $35 million and plans a mixed-use project featuring more than one million sf of entertainment, restaurants, retail, multifamily, office space and two hotels. Oliver McMillan has tapped a team of CB Richard Ellis professionals led by Scott Kaplan, senior managing director of Western Region retail property services as part of the development team.

Kaplan and Bob Duncan of CBRE handled the land sale to the developer, who plans to incorporate historic buildings such as the Guasti Mansion and the Guasti Winery into the site plan "in order to ensure that these pieces of Ontario's history remain a part of the landscape," Kaplan says. The Guasti location has long been considered one of the premier sites in the Inland Empire for development, but "many developers struggled with how to incorporate the historical buildings into a new project," Kaplan says.

Kaplan cites the Glen Town Center in Chicago as an example of Oliver McMillan's approach to redeveloping a historic site. The Glen Town Center is built on the grounds of the former Naval Air Station and its historic Hangar One, where the mixed-use development now serves as a hub for Chicago's North Shore community.

The Guasti project is expected to break ground within 18 to 24 months. Among the CBRE professionals named to the Guasti development team are Ontario-based multifamily specialists Sean Deasy and Bob Patterson, office specialists Philip Woodford and Vindar Batoosingh in the Ontario office, urban specialist Stan McElroy from CBRE's Beverly Hills office and retail specialist Barclay Harty in CBRE's Anaheim office.

Oliver McMillan is a 27-year-old private firm that develops mixed-use retail, entertainment and residential projects, both privately and through public-private partnerships. Jim Reynolds of Oliver McMillan comments that CBRE will serve "not only in providing expert leasing services, but more importantly, as strategic consultants on the project."