Equal parts grit and glamour, Hollywood Boulevard is one of the most famous streets in the world, laying claim to a number of iconic landmarks. Best known for the Hollywood Walk of Fame, which stretches across 15 of its blocks (as well as three on neighboring Vine Street), the storied strip also is home to Grauman’s Chinese Theater, where many a celebrity hand and footprint have been immortalized, and the 3,575-seat Kodak Theatre, the site of the annual Academy Awards and Cirque du Soleil’s newest permanent show, Iris.
Rising amid these attractions is 6922 Hollywood, a 205,500-square-foot retail and office tower that has its own claim to fame. It formerly was known as the TV Guide Hollywood Center, where the media company – as its anchor tenant – occupied three floors and had rooftop signage for a decade until 2006, when it relocated two blocks away to 1800 Highland Avenue. Fronting the Kodak Theatre, the 12-story building is locked down once a year during the Academy Awards because of its location directly across from the limousine drop-off for the ceremony’s attendees.
6922 Hollywood currently is 99 percent leased, and its largest tenant is Trailer Park, an entertainment marketing and content agency that will be expanding to occupy five floors of the office tower. Other corporate tenants include J2 Global Communications, a cloud-based communications services provider, and advertising firm Euro RSCG Worldwide. Restaurants Baja Fresh Mexican Grill and Hooters and retailers H&M and American Apparel, among others, occupy the building’s 34,000 square feet of retail space.
The property also is the headquarters for its current owner, CIM Group, a real estate fund manager specializing in private equity and debt investments in urban areas of North America. The company, which occupies two floors of the building and still has several years on its lease, purchased the property in 1998 from K Associates, Stanley Black and Joyce Black for $14 million, in what was said to be a direct investment by CIM’s principals.
Stanley Black and his partner, Arthur Kaplan, built 6922 Hollywood between 1965 and 1967 as the headquarters for their company, KB Management, which became a prominent office developer throughout Southern California. For years, the property was known as the Fries Entertainment Building, after a film and television production company that was the building’s long-time anchor tenant.
In the mid-1970s, KB Management sold many of its office properties to Canadian conglomerate Trizec-Hahn (now part of Brookfield Office Properties), but it kept 6922 Hollywood as its headquarters building. After Kaplan died in 1985, Black started a new company, Black Equities Group, with his son, Jack, and a new partner, Bob Barth, in Beverly Hills.
After acquiring the building from Black, CIM proceeded to upgrade the property from Class B to Class A space, renovating all of the floors and common areas, installing fiber optic capability and closing the lobby entrance on Hollywood Boulevard in order to add more retail frontage. The firm has been active in acquiring and redeveloping a string of properties on the boulevard, playing a major role in the recent revitalisation of the once seedy and crime-ridden strip.
In fact, CIM’s redevelopment of 6922 Hollywood is considered to be “the most successful of all Hollywood office buildings,” said Carl Muhlstein, a broker at Cushman & Wakefield. “Many developers who are going to be redeveloping properties in Hollywood study the success of this to see how they could apply it to their own projects.”
On July 1, Hudson Pacific Properties, a publicly-traded Los Angeles-based commercial real estate investor, agreed to acquire the property from CIM for $92.5 million, or $450 per square foot, including the assumption of an existing $42.1 million loan, according to the company’s second quarter results posted last month. In recent years, Hudson has landed a number of prized media and entertainment properties in Hollywood, including Sunset Gower Studios in 2007 and Sunset Bronson Studios in 2008. It also owns the 115,000-square-foot Technicolor Building on 6040 Sunset Boulevard, located next to Sunset Gower.
The 6922 Hollywood sale, which is said to be one of the largest commercial real estate transactions in Tinseltown in several years, currently is in escrow and is expected to close this month. The building is in “an unbeatable location,” said Muhlstein, who, along with Sean Sullivan of Eastdil Secured, represented the seller in the deal. “The foot traffic is incredible, and the retail rents are some of the highest in the city.” It also has mass transit access across the street and is in the vicinity of more than 1,000 residential units. “For office tenants, that’s a great work, live, play setting,” he added.
For the record, the stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6922 Hollywood include exhibition basketball team The Harlem Globetrotters, recording artists Bette Midler and Dionne Warwick, talk show host Gary Collins and makeup artist to the stars Max Factor.
If you do not receive this within five minutes, please try to sign in again. If the problem persists, please email: 
