854 S Sycamore Ave, Los Angeles

The LAAA Team of Marcus & Millichap is pleased to announce the successful closing of 854 S Sycamore Ave, a 4 unit multifamily property located in the heart of the Mid-Wilshire district and at the outskirts of Hancock Park.

Property Overview

Built in 1931 and fully renovated in the past few years, this beautiful Spanish-style building sits on a 0.15 acre corner lot, and the building's 5,302 square feet is equally split into four 2 bed / 1 bath units, with an estimated unit size of 1,325 square feet for each unit. Also, the property has 4 private 1-car garages, one for each tenant to use. The owner of this property, who bought this building nearly 18 years ago, has meticulously renovated the property over the years. Notably, the owner just put a brand new roof on the property in 2020 and has renovated all 4 units in the past few years.

Deal Story

We first met with this seller back in March 2019 when he was first considering selling this property doing a 1031 exchange. By that time, the Seller said he had already finished renovating the property and it was at its highest value, and his main motivation to exchange out of this property was to get away from LA rent control, which is a common concern of property owners. He ended up not moving forward with the exchange in 2019 mostly due to sentimental reasons. He'd owned this property for decades and was not quite ready to let go. It ended up being a good decision to wait because when he was ready to sell and exchange in early 2022, the market was significantly better.

We listed this property in late February and hit the market on March 1st, 2022. Within 2 weeks of marketing, we were able to generate 5 total offers, and these offers came from a mixture of our clients, outside brokers' buyers, and exchange buyers. The seller gave a multiple counter offer with the same price and terms to all 5 buyers, allowing everyone an equal chance to win the deal. Because the seller was going to do a 1031 exchange, we advised him to include the following terms in the counter offer: 1) seller to have (2) 30-day options to extend the close of escrow, 2) after buyer removes all contingencies, the 3% deposit would be nonrefundable AND released to the seller's 1031 exchange accommodator. Both of these terms proved to be very useful later in this exchange process. Only one of the buyers agreed to all of the points in the counter offer (which there were 9 of), and we opened escrow at $2,740,000 on March 15th.

During the due...