Kennedy Wilson Multifamily Sale Breaks Santa Barbara County Records
The $116M deal is the county’s largest by both number of units and sale price
By Nick Trombola January 3, 2025 5:22 pm
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A 460-unit apartment complex along the coast northwest of Los Angeles traded hands on the second-to-last day of the year, setting a sales record for Santa Barbara County in the process.
Boston-based private equity firm Westview Capital Partners paid $116 million, or $252,174 per unit, for La Vista Apartments at 740 South Western Avenue in Santa Maria, Calif., roughly 180 miles northwest of Downtown L.A. Beverly Hills-based investment firm Kennedy Wilson sold the property, which was built in 1979 across 31 acres.
The deal, which closed Dec. 30, breaks the county record for both number of units and for sales price, according to Institutional Property Advisors (IPA). IPA’s Kevin Green, Gregory Harris and Joseph Grabiec brokered the deal.
“The fastest-growing city in Santa Barbara County, Santa Maria is in the midst of a dynamic growth period with surging housing demand,” Grabiec said in a statement.
“La Vista Apartments gives new ownership an attractive yield going in, a durable income stream, and the ability to capture long-term rent growth and loss-to-lease via implementing a light renovation strategy to 95 percent of the units,” Green added.
Aside from its record-breaking status in Santa Barbara County, the $116 million deal qualified as one of the biggest in Southern California in 2024, slightly edging out Prime Residential’s $115 million buy of The Gabriel in October from CP Capital and Greystar.
Yet both still pale compared to Mesirow’s eye-watering $185 million purchase in early December of the 410-unit Preserve at Melrose in the city of Vista, some 42 miles north of Downtown San Diego. And even that was just the fifth-largest single-asset deal in the state this past year.
Nick Trombola can be reached at ntrombola@commercialobserver.com.
