By Jill Cowan
January 4, 2013 | 8:15 p.m
As the Newport Beach City Council gears up for 2013, it will tackle uses for the old City Hall site, an Airport Land Use Commission finding that could affect a development project and analysis of a Corona Del Mar lane merger relocation at its first meeting of the year Tuesday.
Old City Hall site
According to staff reports, the city received 15 responses to an October request for qualifications from groups interested in developing the 4-acre City Hall site with either a boutique hotel or a residential mixed-use complex.
Of those, city staff and the Ad-Hoc Neighborhood Revitalization Committee recommended that the council move to issue a request for proposals from the top three groups in each category.
The groups chosen for possible hotel proposals were Pacific Hospitality Group, RD Olson Development and Sonnenblick Development Co. For residential developments, the group chose AMLI Residential Partners, Archstone and the Shopoff Group.
Uptown Newport
Community members can discuss the possibility of overruling an Oct. 18 Airport Land Use Commission decision on the Uptown Newport project, which found that plans for the development were “inconsistent” with John Wayne Airport’s land use plans.
The council was originally set to have a public hearing Dec. 11. On Tuesday, it can vote to officially notify the commission and the state about its intention to overrule the finding. After more opportunity for public comment, the city could then override the commission’s decision.
Lane merger
The council may also put to rest a proposed location change for a lane merge in Corona del Mar.
In June, the city set up temporary lane markings to test the effects of the proposed change on East Coast Highway at MacArthur Boulevard. The change would have added sidewalk space nearby.
In late October, the city found that congestion in that area increased and the council voted to have the temporary markings removed.
The council is scheduled to hear a final report on the trial period.
Public comment changes
Issues that may not be up for much discussion are proposed changes to the council’s public comment policy.
A consent calendar item, which city staff typically expects to pass without council debate, would change council policy to decrease the amount of time members of the public would have to comment on matters that appear on the meeting agenda.
The change would allow three minutes of public comment on agenda items, whereas now, five minutes is allowed.
In the general public comment period, when community members can comment on anything, the time limit is already three minutes, which wouldn’t change, a staff report said. The council would still be able to lengthen or shorten those time limits on a case-by-case basis.
The consent calendar item would also change policy to allow only members of the council to pull items from the consent calendar for further discussion. Now, any member of the public can also ask for more discussion on consent calendar issues.
Tuesday’s meeting is scheduled for 7 p.m. at Newport Beach City Council Chambers, 100 Civic Center Drive.
jill.cowan@latimes.com
Twitter: @jillcowan
“After I spoke on a Bisnow hotel panel three weeks ago, I stuck around and chatted with numerous
attendees who came up to our speaker’s dais afterwards.
Do you know that I have now picked up THREE major hotel development deals/projects from that
event from people who approached the panel afterwards?”
— Bob Sonnenblick
Wednesday, April 24 – Thursday, April 25
Washington, DC | The Washington Hilton
The room may have been full of bedheads, but there were no sleepyheads at our Hotel Investment Summit. More than 300 of you attended the event last week at the SLS Hotel Beverly Hills. OK, it’s actually in LA, but we won’t split hairs when our keynote speaker was the hotel’s owner: Sam Nazarian, founder, chairman, and CEO of LA-based sbe.
Pircher, Nichols & Meeks partner Michael Scheinberg (right) introduced the hospitality impresario, who talked about how he began funding hotel operators while in his early 20s and decided he liked the business. Sam says doing the Viceroy in Santa Monica “opened my eyes” to how the worlds of development, hotel operations, food and beverage, and entertainment coalesced into one property. In 2002, he founded sbe, which now has more than 5,000 employees. Next month he’ll begin construction on SLS Hotel & Casino Las Vegas at the old Sahara. sbe will have 3,500 rooms open by the end of 2014 and will be the only operation on the Strip that controls and manages not just the hotel but also food and beverage, retail, and a casino, delivering a life-style value proposition.
Our Summit also featured two all-star panels. The first, moderated by Arent Fox partner Rich Brand, looked at how deals are getting done. Rich’s practice is 50% sports and 50% real estate, with the latter focused mostly on hospitality. Our panelists, who included Wells Fargo’s Vernon Chi and Starwood Property Trust’s Warren de Haan, noted there’s much more interest on the debt side in the hospitality space. Warren says the real change is in the CMBS market, which is “now daring” to finance select-service hotels in even secondary and tertiary markets at decent leverage levels.
The panel also included Clearview Hotel Capital CIO Tom Naughton, CBRE’s Rod Apodaca (who just sold along—with partner Bob Kaplan-the Embassy Hotel Apartments in Santa Monica), and LW Hospitality Advisors CEO Dan Lesser, who says the 24/7 coastal markets are the most desirable-more specifically, the limited or select-service properties. The beauty about this point in the cycle “is that there’s a lot of runway left in terms of rebound.” Rod expects greater activity in 2013 and 2014, noting supply is so limited that anything that comes out gets bombarded with interest.
Homeier & Law partner Michael Homeier moderated our second panel, dealing with development. Over the past three years, the firm has done close to 100 projects using EB-5 financing. Two-thirds of the money has gone into real estate—hotels made up half. The deal size has gone up considerably, as well—from the first project, a $20M raise for the W Hotel in Hollywood, to $110M for Sam’s Sahara project. “This is a real source of alternative financing.” The panel included Sonnenblick Development chairman Bob Sonnenblick, who’s got eight hotel development projects across the country and the Caribbean, and is actively seeking hotel land, and The Chartres Lodging Group president Maki Bara, who says the company has been focused on redevelopment, having done $800M worth of renovation projects in the past 10 years—in some cases, spending more to renovate a property than the purchase price.
Others on the panel included HKS Architects principal/LA office director Scott Hunter and Marriott SVP Chris Rose, who handles development for the company in the Western US. Chris says Marriott’s opening 100 hotels in the US this year and financing depends on the segment. On the full-service side, he’s seeing mostly conversions but points to some recent ground-up activity being done by very wealthy individuals that have the banking relationships and can sign on the note or self-finance. Scott says SKS has a “pretty rich pipeline” of projects with a lot of ground-up construction and redevelopment domestically, “if we can get the locks unlocked on financing.” But the firm’s seeing a lot of growth internationally—especially in China.
While Bob’s avoiding the middle part of the country “like the plague,” he’s heavily invested in SoCal and, especially, NorCal. “We tend to stay near the water,” having learned from developing the Loews Hotel in Santa Monica that there’s only so much beachfront. His biggest problem isn’t financing or city approvals but finding sites. Maki’s ideal opportunity would be a deal in which all three legs of the stool—physical asset, brand, and operations—need to be fixed. For Dan, hospitality is a manic business with dramatic high and lows, all feeding back to the constant repricing of guest rooms. To Vernon, it’s fascinating that New York has added so many rooms in the past three years, noting “top-line fundamental performances haven’t budged an inch.”
Sonnenblick Development’s Bob Sonnenblick is keeping his fingers crossed—and not just for while zip-lining through the rainforest in Costa Rica. Bob tells us he’s waiting to see who is picked to redevelop the Ports O’Call Village in San Pedro. (The final decision is due in one week.)
The City of LA’s RFP will see the 50-year-old complex bulldozed and replaced with a brand new restaurant and retail project on a 30-acre waterfront site. Bob, a panelist at tomorrow’s Bisnow Hotel Investment Summit at the SLS Hotel in Beverly Hills, also tells us the company won an RFP to build a Marriott and a Hyatt Place hotel (335 rooms total) that will be attached to Sacramento International Airport’s new $500M Terminal B. In addition, Sonnenblick plans to begin during 2013 on a 330-room hotel in Cathedral City and has resort hotel projects in the works in the Bahamas and Palm Beach, Fla. Bob just started planning his annual Super Bowl Party for his RE industry friends. The only thing that could cancel the party “is if the Jets go to the Super Bowl,” because in this admittedly unlikely event, the diehard fan plans to be right there cheering them on.
At the Wheel: Developer Bob Sonnenblick at Ports O’Call Village in San Pedro.
New Course
Developers vie to tum Ports 0′ Call into seaside star
[CLICK TO READ]
By JAMES RUFUS KOREN Staff Reporter
To the thousands who flock to Ports O’Call Village in San Pedro every weekend, the waterfront stretch of shops and restaurants is a great place for fresh fish and cold beer. But developers who want to tear it down and rebuild on the site say it could be much more- a shopping, dining and entertainment complex with high-end retailers; a fancy ethnic food market; and even a roller coaster and Ferris wheel.
To the thousands who flock to Ports O’Call Village in San Pedro every weekend, the waterfront stretch of shops and restaurants is a great place for fresh fish and cold beer. But developers who want to tear it down and rebuild on the site say it could be much more- a shopping, dining and entertainment complex with high-end retailers; a fancy ethnic food market; and even a roller coaster and Ferris wheel.
For developers, it’s a chance to build on 30 acres of oceanfront property.
“There’s only so much waterfront property available to be developed,” said Bob Sonnenblick, a principal at Sonnenblick Development LLC in Pacific Palisades one of the developers proposing to redo Ports O’Call. “Anytime you can get 30 acres on the water with a huge amount of frontage, you can’t go too far wrong.” Ports O’Call was built 50 years ago and hasn’t been upgraded much since. Now it’s seen by developers, port officials and even many local business leaders as a run-down relic of the 1960s. Ports O’Call is busy on weekends, but doesn’t draw many customers during the week. Much of its retail and restaurant space is vacant. While developers are optimistic that the right kind of development can bring more visitors and money to San Pedro, some of the factors that have led to the village’s troubles might not be so easily fixed.
[CLICK TO READ]
