Johnny Buss Buys Pacific Palisades Development Site

The eldest son of the Buss sports executive family has picked up a development site in Pacific Palisades after a big week for his family. 

Johnny Buss, the eldest son in the Buss family, purchased a vacant lot at 860 Vía De La Paz for more than $7 million, L.A. Business First reported. Optimus Properties was the seller. Kidder Mathews’ Janet Neman brokered the sale. 

Before the Palisades fire early last year, the site hosted a 35,000-square-foot office and retail building that went up in smoke in the deadly blazes. Optimus bought the office building in 2014 when it was 50 percent vacant, Matt Rothman, Optimus’ director of capital markets, told L.A. Business First. The structure was 98 percent occupied at the time of the fire. 

The 15,000-square-foot lot has been cleared and is zoned for commercial and mixed-use development. The site is in an area packed with retail and is a stone’s throw from Rick Caruso’s Palisades Village shopping center, set for its grand post-fire reopening on Saturday. 

Optimus opted to sell the property because of the “broader business and regulatory climate in the City of Los Angeles” that has made it “increasingly difficult to justify long-term investment” in the city,” company co-founder Kamyar Shabani said of the decision. 

“Given that environment, we felt the right decision for our investors was to redeploy this capital elsewhere,” Shabani said. 

Optimus sold two apartment properties in Koreatown for $13 million late last year. It still owns a Glendale property at 301-343 Glendale Boulevard, retail holdings at 1501 and 1487-1489 Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park, and another retail property at 5214-5232 Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. 

Earlier this week, the Buss family was in the headlines after venture capitalist and real estate scion Josh Kushner and former Disney CEO Bob Iger teamed up to buy the Los Angeles Lakers for $12.5 billion. The family sold its majority stake in the team’s ownership last year to billionaire Mark Walter, who in turn sold to Kushner and Iger. The Buss family retains a 15 percent minority stake in the franchise following the sale. 

— Chris Malone Méndez

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