Nuveen Trades SoCal Apartments Near Harbor for 16% Discount

A San Francisco-based investment and development firm has scooped up one of Southern California’s rarest real estate opportunities — a multifamily complex in the small seaside enclave of Marina Del Rey. 

Carmel Partners paid $141 million for Stella, a 244-unit apartment building at 13488 Maxella Avenue, just a few blocks east of the Marina Del Rey harbor. The deal is both the priciest multifamily trade in the enclave in over a decade, and just one of a handful of properties to swap hands there since 2019. CoStar first reported the news.

Although the sale price breaks down to nearly $578,000 per unit, it’s still notably less than the $167.3 million that seller Nuveen paid for Stella in 2013, property records show. A representative for Carmel Partners did not immediately respond to requests for comment, while a spokesperson for Nuveen declined to comment.

Marina Del Rey — which spans less than one square mile of land — doesn’t often see much movement in the multifamily sector. Pricier deals closed around 2013, when Capri Capital Partners and Kennedy Wilson acquired the Esprit, a 437-unit complex, for $225 million. But zero new multifamily projects have delivered since 2019, and only five properties have sold in the past decade, according to data from Colliers. 

One of those properties, the 198-unit Villa Del Mar, which sold to an undisclosed buyer in July for $62 million, is emblematic of the asset scarcity. Seller Far West Management had developed the property — the third largest of only 16 harborside multifamily complexes in Marina Del Rey — in 1972 and operated it over the subsequent five decades. 

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