Jamison Expands in $31M Sale-Leaseback

The 12-story 3424 Wilshire building, situated adjacent to the former Ambassador Hotel location at the southeast corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Mariposa Avenue, has been occupied for years by the Archdiocesan Catholic Center, which has leased back approximately 57,000 sf of the space in the 203,000-sf building.

According to Richard Dunn, the archdiocese is downsizing its presence in the building. "The Wilshire Center continues to be a good long-term location for the Archdiocesan Catholic Center," says Dunn, who arranged the donation of 3424 Wilshire Blvd. to the Archdiocese of Los Angeles from Thrifty Corp. in 1996. "This transaction enables them to implement their facilities strategy of downsizing their office space occupancy to meet their current and ongoing needs," he says.

The archdiocese has occupied all of the building except for its ground-floor retail space, so the downsizing of the archdiocese office space will leave about 120,000 sf available for lease, Mike Dunn tells GlobeSt.com. Jamison will be handling the leasing in-house.

The new Jamison asset is close to the firm's roots in the Mid-Wilshire district, where the company began buying some of its first buildings years ago and where it first established its submarket dominance as a landlord. Since then Jamison has expanded into other Los Angeles area office markets, including Downtown L.A., where the locally based office landlord last year bought the 32-story, 618,000-sf 1055 W. Seventh St. office building for approximately $184 million.

The acquisition of 3424 Wilshire also builds on Jamison's growing portfolio, which includes more than 22 million sf of commercial office space in Los Angeles, ranking the company as one of the largest owners of office space in Southern California.