Timber! Innovative Office Building Trades in LA
This property changed hands as part of a portfolio deal.
A 122,700-square-foot property at 843 N. Spring St. in Los Angeles, one of the first and largest cross-laminated timber office buildings in the city, has changed hands for $35.8 million, according to Yardi Matrix information. Developer Redcar Properties sold the asset to Civicap Partners, a Houston-based real estate investment firm.
Civicap also secured a $42.3 million acquisition loan from Bank OZK, the same source shows. The note is due to mature in November 2027.
The transaction was part of a Los Angeles-area portfolio that Civicap purchased from Redcar, a Santa Monica, Calif.,-based privately held real estate investment company that invests in urban commercial real estate and converts underperforming industrial properties into buildings including creative office environments. Details on the other properties in the portfolio or the total investment by Civicap were not disclosed.
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Tom Bacon, co-founder & managing partner of Civicap, told Commercial Property Executive the purchase of 843 N. Spring St. was part of “several opportunistic investments” made by the firm, which has been mainly developing and acquiring attainable housing in Texas. Civicap’s portfolio includes multifamily assets in cities such as Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, Austin and Waco.
“We have been focused on creating well located, high-quality living options for people with income levels in the 60 percent to 120 percent of AMI,” Bacon said.
Prior to forming Civicap, Bacon was a founding partner in Lionstone Investments, which he described as a leader in creative office investments in Los Angeles from 2001 to 2017. He noted they “had a lot of success with the outstanding Redcar team” during that period.
Bacon also said Lionstone was sold in 2017 and he and his partners formed Civicap to pursue creating “affordable living in unaffordable locations.” Recently, their attention returned to Southern California.
“My partners and I have always really liked L.A. and are pleased to have the opportunity to reinvest in this market,” Bacon told CPE.
Bacon described 843 N. Spring St. as a “super high-quality new office building in a great transit location purchased at a good price.” He said Civicap plans to continue operating the property as high-quality office space, adding Redcar “designs and builds the best creative office available in the U.S.”
Spring Street spotlight
Completed in 2024, the property has 122,000 square feet of office space, 7,000 square feet of retail space and a 144-space parking garage. The transit-oriented development is located next to the Chinatown Metro Rail station on a corner south of College Street’s intersection with Broadway.
The award-winning five-story mixed-use building is an adaptive reuse project designed by LEVER Architecture that took a windowless, 1980s-era retail warehouse with an underground parking garage and added a timber-and-steel building above it. The building, which has a facade clad almost entirely in glass, has two four-story wings above the garage. The building has an interior courtyard, atrium and walking path through its center. Exposed steel concrete and CLT beams run throughout the open-floor plan interior. About 82,000 square feet of three-ply and five-ply CLT panels were used for the ceilings and floors.
Other sustainability feature include a rooftop solar PV array, EV charging stations and bike stalls. Rainwater is recycled for re-use on site for landscape irrigation.
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