The 17-story Wilshire Boulevard office tower will be converted into 210 apartments.
Jamison Services, a Koreatown-based developer in Los Angeles specializing in office-to-residential conversions, is carrying out its largest adaptive reuse project to date.
The company plans to convert a 17-story office building at 6380 Wilshire Boulevard into 210 apartment units, Urbanize Los Angeles informed.
The project will retain the mid-1960s-style 144K SF office building’s windows and glazing, while adding a rooftop penthouse and upgrading an existing parking lot by adding windows.
The converted building will offer studios and apartments with up to three bedrooms, and will feature 27K SF of shared amenities, including a theater, gym, yoga studio, golf simulator, sky lounge, and rooftop pool.
Jamison has converted seven office buildings in Los Angeles, encompassing 1,200 units. Last month, the company filed plans to convert a 95,000-square-foot office building located at 520 South La Fayette Park Place into apartments. The building, which opened in 1971 in Westlake, is near the Wilshire/Vermont metro station.
Last summer, Jamison filed plans to convert the 13-story Pierce National Life Building, located at 3807-3815 Wilshire Boulevard in Koreatown, into a 176-unit apartment tower.
Plans for the Pierce National Life conversion include shops and restaurants on the ground floor, as well as a rooftop pool deck with a 7,100K SF lounge. The building, which is located at the northwest corner of Wilshire and Western Avenue, was built in 1965.
Last year, a Rand Corp. study identified 2,300 underutilized office and hotel properties in Los Angeles County that are suitable for conversion into housing. Most of the properties studied were old office buildings.
If all of these buildings were converted, up to 113,000 new housing units would be created, according to the Rand study. Most of the conversion opportunities are in DTLA, the city’s oldest office market.
Vacancies in the Greater Los Angeles market reached 20% in the first quarter as net absorption was a negative 1.3 million square feet, according to the CBRE market report. Sublease availability represented 16.3% of overall availability in Los Angeles, increasing by more than 1 million square feet in the first quarter to an all-time high of 10.7 million square feet.
“Despite office space being listed and vacant in high volume, asking rents remain relatively unchanged as landlords offset historically high rates with strong concession packages in an effort to boost leasing activity,” it said. the CBRE report.
The Los Angeles metropolitan area saw 2.2 million square feet of leasing activity in the first quarter of 2023, the lowest level since the fourth quarter of 2020, CBRE said.
