Arden Acquires $23M Office Project

AGOURA HILLS, CA-Arden Realty Inc. of Los Angeles has acquired the 115,000-sf Agoura Hills Business Park from Los Angeles-based Lowe Enterprises for $23.2 million, bringing Arden’s year-to-date acquisitions total to $349 million. Howard Stern, SVP and chief investment officer for the REIT, tells GlobeSt.com that the purchase of the two-story class A office property continues the company’s capital recycling program and adds to its Conejo Corridor holdings.”The market is strong out there, and we wanted to add to our Conejo Corridor holdings,” Stern tells GlobeSt.com. The Agoura Hills property, at 30401-30501 Agoura Hills Rd., was built in 1988 and is 90% leased to a tenant roster including IBM, Prudential and Toyota. Arden represented itself in the transaction, with Lowe Enterprises represented by Mark Perry, Carlene O’Neil and Nancy Stark of the Sherman Oaks office of CB Richard Ellis, along with Michael Slater and Tom Dwyer of the Ventura office of CBRE.Along with its $349 million in acquisitions this year, including office buildings in San Diego and in the Miracle Mile district of L.A., Arden has closed on the dispositions of $93 million worth of properties as part of its capital recycling program. The aim of the program is to divest non-strategic assets in places that are not Arden’s core markets and to redeploy the proceeds of those sales into higher quality assets.Stern says Arden’s numbers at the end of 2005 year will probably show the company as a net buyer, but it is still selling non-core assets such as four properties that it disposed of recently for $67.6 million. The four included sales of buildings in Bakersfield and Long Beach that were reported recently on GlobeSt.com, along with the sale of a 55,200-sf building at 145 S. Fairfax Ave. for $12 million.The buyer of the Fairfax Avenue building, which is near the Grove shopping center and was approximately 90% occupied at the time of the sale, was Los Angeles-based Jamison Properties. Arden was represented by Joel Frank and Jeff Resnick of First Property Realty Corp. in West Los Angeles.