Faris Lee arranges $38.7 million sale of Lakewood Center's Home Depot and Albertsons parcels

Faris Lee Investments has arranged the $38.7 million sale of a 155,000-square-foot, two-tenant retail asset inside Lakewood Center, the Los Angeles County regional mall complex where a Home Depot and an Albertsons each occupy their own parcel, to a high-net-worth family office from a consortium of multiple owners, according to Connect CRE. The Faris Lee team — managing principals Don MacLellan and Jeff Conover, senior managing director Scott DeYoung and director Greg Lukosky — represented both sides.

The pricing arithmetic puts a rough floor under the trade: 154,997 square feet across 14.7 acres works out to about $250 a square foot, a basis that reflects the land more than the income. Both tenants hold their parcels under absolute below-market ground leases, so the buyer picks up a supply-constrained Southern California position, two national credits, and a ground rent that has fallen behind the market it sits in. Nobody pays $250 a foot inside a dominant regional destination for the current coupon.

No one has disclosed the ground rent, remaining lease term, cap rate, or split between the two parcels. That omission is not an oversight so much as the nature of the asset: ground leases price off contract rent plus reversion, and the value lives in the gap between what the tenants pay and what the dirt would command today. MacLellan's framing leans on scarcity rather than yield, calling Lakewood Center an exceptional retail destination and the chance to buy two dominant national tenants in a supply-constrained location "extremely compelling."

The trade also fits the position this publication has taken: retail pricing has decoupled from cap rates and is now set by anchor lease duration, with the scarcity premium landing on net-lease and grocery; Albertsons supplies the grocery half of that premium and Home Depot the duration half. That a family office rather than a net-lease REIT or an institution signed for the position continues the pattern of private capital stepping into single retail assets, a route marked earlier by an ECHO Realty–TPG venture buying its first center outside Philadelphia. The seller side raises its own question: a consortium of multiple owners selling 14.7 acres as one position suggests parcels that had accumulated across several hands and were simpler to move together than apart, though how the ownership was assembled is not described. The next comparable trade in the same submarket will say whether $250 a foot for owned dirt under national anchors is a one-off family-office outcome or a level the market is clearing at.