Vanbarton Group Lands $28M Refi for Hollywood Asset

6725 Sunset Blvd. Image courtesy of JLL

Vanbarton Group LLC has scored a $28.1 million refinancing for its newly renovated creative office building along Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard, amid a strained property market in the entertainment mecca.

Insurance firm Global Atlantic Financial Group provided the floating-rate loan for the property, 6725 Sunset Blvd. A JLL Capital Markets team led by Managing Director Todd Sugimoto and Directors Spencer Richley and Keith Rosso secured the financing.

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Built in 1963, the five-story, 73,852-square-foot property houses multiple office tenants and comes with an adjacent three-story parking garage. New York-based real estate investment and advisory firm Vanbarton paid Crown Realty & Development $38 million for the asset in 2018.

Vanbarton recently finished a multi-million dollar upgrade that included renovating the building’s lobby, common areas and private courtyard. The building features floor plates of roughly 15,000 square feet and now includes several modernized, turnkey office suites that are immediately available for lease, according to a statement by JLL.

Located nearby the TCL Chinese Theatre and less than a mile west of Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, 6725 Sunset Blvd. is positioned to tap demand from the area’s entertainment, media, technology and creative-office users.

Tinseltown struggles

6725 Sunset Blvd. amenity space. Image courtesy of JLL

The pandemic and lockdown have battered the Los Angeles office market. Savills reported that only 10 million square feet of office space was leased in 2020, down 44 percent from the previous year’s total of 18 million square feet, as most occupiers rolled out work-from-home policies and put off long-term real estate decisions.

The turmoil didn’t spare Hollywood, where the availability rate jumped to 26.3 percent by the end of 2020, the brokerage found. In West Hollywood, that figure was 18 percent. Overall availability in Los Angeles rose 240 basis points over the third quarter to 22.5 percent at year-end.

The neighboring media hub of Burbank has fared better than Hollywood, buoyed in part by Netflix’s 171,000-square-foot office lease at Burbank Empire Center in September. The streaming giant plans to open its first animation studio at the building. Walt Disney Co. also inked a 425,000-square-foot office renewal at 3800 W. Alameda Ave. in the city last year.

The sales market has also been active in the area. In June, Blackstone Property Partners bought a 49 percent stake in Hudson Pacific Properties’ Hollywood Media Portfolio, a 2.2 million-square-foot collection of studios and Class A office buildings valued at $1.7 billion. Netflix is the anchor tenant, leasing more than 7000,000 square feet of the portfolio located at 5800 Sunset Blvd., 1438 N. Gower St. and 1040 N. Las Palmas Ave.