Hot Property: NY Commercial Real Estate Investors Eye Profits in Downtown L.A.

New York real estate investors are seeing downtown Los Angeles in a new light.

According to a new report on the Los Angeles Times, the area, which has been “disdained by Wall Street as a weak collection of office buildings with new pizzazz” is currently fetching millions from this savvy class of investors hoping to turn the area into a bustling commercial district.

Citing data from real estate firm Cassidy Turley, the report said that L.A. has “seen a 23 percent increase in dollar volume” for closed deals from NYC entities, compared with last year’s numbers. Investments from New York starting 2012 through this year have exceeded $4.4 billion in the county.

“That's equivalent to buying 12 U.S. Bank Towers, the tallest building in the West,” the L.A. Times report noted.

“Los Angeles has hit critical mass in downtown. Firms from New York show up and say, wow, I see the potential I saw in Hell's Kitchen a decade ago,” NY-based Related Cos. realtor Greg Vilkin told the paper.

The report revealed that buyers are snapping up existing commercial properties that can benefit from a facelift and morphed into profit-churning developments.

An old 1920s office building along Bunker Hill was turned into a high-end apartment, while a 19-century factory was turned into a facility that now houses New York’s famed Chelsea Market.

L.A. developer Christopher Rising said New York investment firms used to be averse to placing their portfolios in downtown L.A. with most of them seeing the area as a “big office park with persistently high vacancy rate,” the paper stated.

Two years ago, Rising tried to persuade investors to redevelop an old office complex to no avail. But now, it seems like investors have changed their minds.  

“Downtown reminds New York investors of what their neighborhoods looked like before redevelopment swept through Manhattan and into the other boroughs, analysts and longtime developers say,” the report said.

Downtown L.A. has also recently caught the attention of Miami-based Lennar Multifamily Communities which has begun construction for its new mixed-use rental community, Olympic and Olive, according to Real Estate Rama.

Resurging activities in the market are giving realtors in downtown L.A. a new reason to be more active in the scene and to use real estate technologies to market their listings. Realbiz Media Group, Inc. RBIZ develops proprietary video marketing software that agents and their brokers can use to promote their virtual tour listings online. The company offers a Virtual Tour Program that allows real estate sellers to create virtual tours and presentations that are optimized for mobile viewing and could be syndicated through social media for only $29.95 a month.

The program is equipped with a video search engine optimization (VSEO) tool that automatically generate meta tags and descriptions for virtual tours and listings agents have uploaded to the platform so that they would be found easily by consumers online.

The program also has tools for creating QR codes, e-flyers, and seller reports as bonus features.

Realbiz Media’s platforms, applications and web sites feature social integration, which allow agents to cross-publish their posts to social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest.

To learn more about Realbiz Media and its products, contact sales@realbizmediagroup.com or call 1.888.REAL.BIZ (888.732.5249).