What a difference 9 years makes in Valley real estate: players and projects made it all interesting

What a difference 9 years makes in Valley real estate: players and projects made it all interesting.

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This is my last column for the Business Journal.

On Aug. 61 will join Lee & Associates LA North/Ventura Inc. as director of marketing after more than nine years here, all of them coveting real estate.

It's been an action-packed job, changing almost with each new day, as I was reminded recently when Los Angeles City Councilman Dennis Zine told me a story from his days as a beat cop.

He found himself chasing a "perp" into the Topanga Theater in a dramatic cops-and-robbers scene that ended behind the movie screen of the theater as the audience looked on.

The Topanga Theater is gone. So is the big vacant Woodland Hills hill side at DeSoto and Oxnard avenues that was once called Warner Ridge, the GM Plant in Panorama City, the old Lockheed Martin Skunk Works plant in Burbank, and the Adolf's factory and Robinsons-May headquarters in North Hollywood.

Many of the San Fernando Valley's old landmarks have been replaced in the years since I started writing about real estate for the Business Journal.

I didn't know it at the time, but a sea change was taking place, transforming the Valley from its suburban roots to a metropolis rife with business opportunities, and real estate posed some of the biggest.

In 1998, Douglas Emmett began the redevelopment of the Sherman Oaks Galleria, Rick Caruso began the Calabasas Commons, a little known Miami residential developer, Lennar Corp., acquired the Prudential campus in Warner Center. Jerry Katell was working on the redevelopment of Warner Ridge. An entrepreneur, whose company provided pay phones for prisons and other public buildings, began work on the Premiere at Sherman Oaks, one of the first, large-scale luxury apartments in the Valley. Voit Co. and Selleck Development Group began an industrial complex on the site of the dormant GM Plant in Panorama City.

Many of these projects became harbingers of the future. Lennar (which spun off a commercial group called LNR Property Group) ushered in a wave of campus-style office developments much like those that characterized the Westside. The Commons, with its outdoor, Main-Street U.S.A. design, replaced the traditional enclosed mall as the preferred shopping environment. The Premiere along with Warner Ridge (which was ultimately sold to a residential developer) and the lofts that emerged from the Adolf's factory turned out to be at the forefront of a gentrification that has led to widespread acceptance of luxury apartments and one-half-million-dollar condos in a community that was once the exclusive domain of the single-family-home-with-backyard-and-barbeque set. Zellman's Empire Center (since sold) on the site of Lockheed's former plant, became the prototypical big box power center.

The players

Players came and went. Paul Jenkins, CEO of PCS, the developers of Premiere and a number of other luxury developments throughout the Valley, was, when I last spoke with him, working on a development in Mexico. Katell, as of his last e-mail, is exploring Italy full time. Though Voit Co. is still very active in the area, Bob Voit spends most of his time in Orange County, and Tim Regan heads development activities here.

Back in 1998, Westfield was a little known developer from Australia that had acquired the Topanga mall a year earlier and followed it up with the acquisition of the Promenade in Woodland Hills the next year. Today, with a hugely successful expansion of Topanga under its belt, another underway at Fashion Square and a third proposed in Woodland Hills, the company is the largest shopping center developer in the San Fernando Valley and, to most folks, a local business.

Robinsons-May is now Macy's, and, from what I read, Macy's may not be Macy's for long.

J. Allen Radford, who, after being chosen by the Community Redevelopment Agency to redevelop NoHo, took me on a tour through ramshackle buildings and littered alleyways, is long gone, having relinquished his development rights to J.H. Snyder Co. Snyder is just finishing up a wholesale transformation of North Hollywood.

Douglas Emmett owns most of the Warner Center along with downtown Sherman Oaks and parts of Encino.

As with most journalism jobs, I hit the ground running as I began covering the real estate beat. It took years before the full impact of the things I was writing about really sunk in.

In those early days, I relied on many of my readers to bring me up to speed and teach me what I needed to know. I am grateful to all of you, too many to mention by name, for your time, your patience and your trust. (To the dozens of you who explained cap rates to me, over and over again, I apologize.)

You shared not just your news, but also your expertise, perspectives and even your anxieties about the future and the risks you were taking.

There were some tough years. No sooner did the memory of the 90s recession fade than the Internet bubble burst and the terrorist attacks of 9/11 brought best-laid plans to a halt.

Cycles came and passed. Rents rose, fell and rose again. Leasing was brisk, and then it slowed. Developments began, stalled and moved forward. Acquisition activity fired up.

I will miss hearing of your victories. I will be just a little less wise without your perspectives about the long haul when things turn sour. (Calling every 30 days as you underestimated the time to close a deal, not so much.)

And as I look back, I see that what I learned was not just about real estate. Here are some of the lessons I will take with me:

* You can get there first and still finish last. Just ask Radford, who couldn't deliver in NoHo and had to turn the job over to Snyder.

* You never know where the next great idea will come from. Hardly anyone knew Rick Caruso when he started building the Commons, and his vision turned out to be the shopping center of the 21st Century.

* The more things change, the more they stay the same. The Universal Studios expansion plan was nearly implemented, pulled entirely off the table and now is back on the drawing board under NBC's tutelage.

* No guts. No glory. M. David Paul started redeveloping the Burbank Media Center as the entertainment industry retrenched. He stuck with it. His Burbank developments are among the most successful in the Valley and the area rents are hitting records.

* It ain't over 'till it's over. Selleck Development got the green light from the city for a Home Depot development in Agoura Hills and lost the battle when local retailers put the issue on the ballot. Lowe's and Rotkin Real Estate Group failed to get the Westlake Village city council to approve their development proposal and brought the issue to a vote, but the retailer and developer lost anyway.

* Nothing is certain. And everything is possible.

See ya around the Valley.

Please forward correspondence and press releases to San Fernando Valley Business Journal Editor Jason Schaff at jschaff@sfvbj.com.