DEAL OF THE DAY: Lee & Associates Transacts $4.7M Purchase of Foreclosed Condos/Apts.

Valley Village, Calif.– Fifty-one vacant apartment units at 11927 – 33 Magnolia Boulevard in Valley Village, Calif. have been sold to a private investor for $4.7 million in an all-cash transaction.

Craig Stevens, Mike Smith and Jim Fisher, principals at Lee & Associates-LA North/Ventura Inc. and the Lee Multi-Housing Investments Group, represented the buyer in the sale.

“Although this was a challenging transaction it was not atypical of the types of issues buyers must deal with in today’s market,” Stevens says. “In this case, we had a foreclosed property with entitlements that are no longer feasible for building in today’s market.”

The property had been entitled for 78 condominium units or 146 apartment units when it went into foreclosure. The bank that acquired it, First Regional Bank, later went into receivership and First-Citizens Bank & Trust Company acquired its deposits along with $2.17 billion of its assets.

“We worked very closely with our buyer to develop an acquisition strategy that would yield favorable returns while addressing market realities,” Smith says.

The buyer, Pacific Valley Associates LLC, is a value-added investor who looks for properties that can be rehabilitated to achieve higher returns. The property had been vacated per the Ellis Act when the previous developer acquired it with the intention of redeveloping it for condominium units. Responding to current market conditions, Pacific Valley Associates LLC intends to reopen the property as rental units.

The property, constructed in 1953 and 1954, sits on 61,580-square-feet of land.