5-Acre Office-to-Resi Site Trades for $27M in SoCal

A 5-acre site in Southern California with a two-story office building has new owners with plans to redevelop it into a multifamily asset. 

Gemdale USA, the U.S. affiliate of Chinese investment firm Gemdale, sold 2400 Barranca Parkway in Irvine to a partnership of Irvine Community Land Trust (ICLT) and USA Properties for $26.5 million, according to Traded. Institutional Property Advisors’ Kevin Green, Joseph Grabiec, Greg Harris and Mark DeGiorgio represented both parties in the deal.

The office building on the property is available for redevelopment, as the land falls within the Irvine Business Complex (IBC) district, a section of the city targeted for fresh residential projects by the Irvine City Council. The council in October voted 4-1 to approve zoning for up to 15,000 units of high-density housing within the IBC as part of its 2045 General Plan. 

“This site presented a multitude of development opportunities from for-sale townhomes to industrial redevelopment,” Green said in a statement. “Inevitably, after a broad marketing process in which we generated over 30 offers from both commercial and residential developers, the [buyers] will look to develop much-needed affordable multifamily housing on the site.”

Gemdale USA did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

2400 Barranca Parkway sits across the parkway from The District at Tustin Legacy, a shopping complex that includes Whole Foods, TJ Maxx, Costco, a Lowe’s home improvement store, the AMC Tustin 14 movie theaters, and several restaurants.

The property is not the only one that Gemdale USA has sold in Southern California in recent weeks. The investment firm earlier this month traded a three-story, roughly 223,000-square-foot office property in Calabasas, dubbed The Park Calabasas, to a partnership between Cross Ocean Partners and the Palisade Group for $69.4 million. 

Nick Trombola can be reached at ntrombola@commercialobserver.com.