Primestor Returns To San Diego County With $86M Chula Vista Buy

Culver City-based Primestor Development has spent $86.1M to purchase a San Diego County mall and redevelopment opportunity in a growing, border-close city. 

The 490K SF open-air Chula Vista Center is 89% occupied and is among the top 3% for foot traffic at shopping centers in the country, according to data from Placer.ai. The deal is technically a reentry into San Diego County for Primestor, which has owned medical office and office buildings in the region, but it’s by far the biggest purchase and project there for the Los Angeles-based developer. 

“This project gave us an ability to open up an office in San Diego with the intention to do more in the county,” Primestor CEO and co-founder Arturo Sneider said. “It’s a market entry, not just an asset.” 

Chula Vista has grown immensely over the decades, most recently spurred by a major revamp of the waterfront that will bring 1,200 hotel rooms, a convention center and a dozen new restaurants, Sneider said. All that activity is about a mile from Chula Vista Center. 

The 32-acre property was on Primestor’s radar for years, and when it came to market, they felt that all the pieces of the puzzle came together. 

“I had family in Chula Vista when I was a child,” Sneider said. “My grandparents had moved out there, and as I kept visiting them over the years, I saw that community grow.” 

Primestor bought the property because it felt it was both a good investment in terms of cash flow and “that we were buying at a price where the redevelopment opportunities that we have yet to determine were still going to be viable.” 

Primestor is eyeing the at-grade parking on the property, which Snieder says is a great place to put some additional density. Previous ownership sold portions of the large retail site, including for roughly 200 townhomes and the development of a headquarters for healthcare company Sharp, both of which are in the works now. 

The developer will undertake some hardscape and landscape alterations to improve continuity between the commercial and residential uses at the site, Sneider said.

“We are going to look to continue to integrate those uses into the property — find the daytime population connectivity and also provide some essential services to those new homeowners coming in, and create the beginning of a live, work, play city block,” Sneider said. 

Ultimately, the plan is to add new residential to the site, but the details are still coming together. A full timeline will form after Primestor gets more clarity from community outreach, which Sneider anticipates will take the rest of this year. 

Sneider said there's an incredible attachment to the location among the community members he heard from when Primestor did outreach during their due diligence process. That attachment includes “a desire to see [the Chula Vista Center] come back to its sort of dominant position, and that the city is very proactive in being involved in helping this happen.” 

He compared the local enthusiasm to what he encountered after the purchase of the Panorama Mall in LA’s Panorama City neighborhood. That project is wrapping up its environmental studies, with the public release of the draft reports coming “fairly soon,” Sneider said. 

Primestor has about 1B SF in the pipeline and plans to focus on that for the next few years.