NewMark Merrill Companies has bought a retail strip in Thousand Oaks — formerly home to a Sears department store.
The Calabasas company bought the 172,800-square-foot center at 145 West Hillcrest Drive from Seritage Retail Group, NewMark announced Friday, but did not disclose the sales price. CBRE’s Phil Voorhees and Jimmy Slusher brokered the deal on behalf of Seritage.
Property records show NewMark bought the property for $27.5 million, using a $17.2 million loan from Prime Finance, a direct lender based in San Francisco. The deal came out to $159 a square foot.
The property was built as a department store for Sears about 50 years ago.
In 2015, Sears spun off 235 of its properties to form Seritage — one of which was the Thousand Oaks property, where it occupied the entire building.
In connection with the spinoff, it shrunk its space down to 68,750 square feet. The remaining space was leased to Nordstrom Rack and Designer Shoe Warehouse, both still tenants.
Three years later, Sears announced it would close 78 stores across the U.S., including the Thousand Oaks location. Since then, Dave & Busters has leased a portion of the space.
NewMark Merrill owns the adjacent 458,000-square-foot Janss Marketplace, which it bought in 2001 for more than $30 million, according to reports at the time.
The firm has proposed to redevelop Janss into a mixed-use development, with a 216-key hotel.
NewMark, run by CEO Sandy Sigal, owns retail centers in California, Colorado, Illinois and Washington. In October, the firm bought a pair of shopping centers near Chicago’s Midway International Airport for $24 million.
