Disney named buyer of Yamaha's 25-acre Cypress campus in $115 million sale

The Walt Disney Co. has emerged as the buyer of Yamaha Motor Corporation U.S.A.'s 25-acre headquarters campus in Cypress, paying $115 million for three buildings the seller will lease back through Dec. 31, 2028 while it relocates to Kennesaw, Georgia. LA Business First identified Disney as the buyer and Avison Young as the arranging broker; the property at 6555 Katella Ave. combines one industrial, one flex and one office building totaling 278,964 square feet. The price works out to about $412 a square foot, or $4.6 million an acre, a blended figure across those three building types that suggests the land, more than the improvements, carried most of the value.

Yamaha has occupied the site since 1979, so Disney is buying an occupied campus with a known move-out date. LA Business First reports the buyer's intended use is back-office operations, which makes this an occupier's purchase: the office component arrives with its end user already decided, so the trade prices Cypress land more cleanly than it prices Cypress office space. The blended basis reflects that back-office capacity, not the stand-alone market for any one building type.

Avison Young's Patrick Barnes, Paul Clark, Nick Slonek and Jae Estep represented Yamaha, with Jeff Estep, a managing principal in the brokerage's occupier services group, serving as program manager. Barnes called the sale transformational for both Yamaha and the City of Cypress and attributed the buyer's interest to the asset's quality and the strength of the local market. The assignment lands weeks after the brokerage closed its second recapitalization in two years, cutting debt and preferred equity by nearly 70%, bringing lenders into common equity and adding an acquisitions credit line, as this publication reported in August. Whether that repair is translating into deal volume will have to be read from the firm's next few quarters of closed transactions.

The coverage reports no cap rate, financing terms, land-versus-building allocation or fit-out budget, leaving the per-foot number to do much of the interpreting. It is a blend, after all; an office square foot and a warehouse square foot are different products, and $412 averages the three buildings on the site. Disney has not disclosed a conversion budget, and the leaseback expires Dec. 31, 2028, after which the back-office build-out follows. Only then does it become clear how much of the $115 million was payment for land and how much for a campus nearly ready to use.