Laurus Invests Another $30M at Howard Hughes

LOS ANGELES—The Laurus Corp. is planning to invest an additional $30 million into the Howard Hughes Center, which it purchased last week from Passco Cos. for $111 million, GlobeSt.com reported at the time. The renovations will aim to open and energize the center to provide a shopping and entertainment haven for the growing community in Playa Vista. Laurus purchased the 250,000-square-foot retail complex noting that it was rare to find a high-quality asset with vacancy.

“Playa Vista is becoming one of the most incredible success stories. Immediately in the area around the center, you have 3,200 apartment units going up, and groups like Yahoo, Google and a lot of other high-tech and media companies that are moving in or expanding their footprint,” Austin Khan, chief investment officer at the Laurus Corp., tells GlobeSt.com about why the property was a good acquisition opportunity for the company. “What that means for a retail center is that there is a lot of new demand filling in that has not historically been there. We look at that as creating an opportunity to really reinvent the center into being a destination for L.A. at large and for that new community that is forming around it. It is very rare in Los Angeles to find this type of well-located, high-quality center that has vacancy in it. Generally, in West L.A., vacancy rates are in the very low single digits. With Nordstroms deciding to move out due to a corporate strategy, it opened a space for us that had not been on the market in close to 10 years.”