L.A.’s Hanover Warner Center Trades Hands

Bell Partners has acquired Hanover Warner Center through its Bell Core Fund I as part of the company’s West Coast expansion. The 352-unit apartment building was built in 2020 and is located in the San Fernando Valley submarket of Los Angeles. Bell Partners has rebranded the property Bell Warner Center.

The property is notable because of its proximity to job centers in Woodland Park, Thousand Oaks and Burbank. These markets are hubs for life science, content creation and other major industries in Los Angeles. Intuit, Blackline, AMC Networks, Warner Bros., Netflix and Morgan Stanley are all major employers in the area.

Bell Warner Center is amenitized with executive conference and meeting rooms, a 24-hour fitness center, a controlled-access parking garage and a community atrium with an outdoor café and fire pit. Nickolay Bochilo, EVP of Investments at Bell Partners said the property is well positioned to benefit from changing migration patterns to suburban markets.

Bell is an active buyer of apartment assets. Earlier this year, Bell Partners formed an $800 million core multifamily venture with long-standing institutional partners. The company intends to purchase more than $1.5 billion in assets, through the venture. The venture will acquire well-located, low risk, high-quality multifamily properties in submarkets throughout the US. It will aim to acquire assets that can generate consistent cash flow with strong appreciation over a long-term investment.

Last year, Bell closed the Bell Apartment Fund VII at its hard cap of $950 million in equity commitments. The fund exceeded its target size of $800 million, with commitments coming from a broad range of domestic and international institutional investors, the company reported. Many of the investors came from Bell Apartment Fund VI and there were accredited high-net-worth investors as well.

The Los Angeles apartment market has been resilient through the recession and has already recovered any losses from the last year, according to the latest research from Marcus & Millichap. Apartment leasing is at a 15-year high, illustrating the strong renter demand. Demand has been so healthy that vacancy has fallen to 4% and rents are up 3% for the year.