Triple Five Group chairman Nader Ghermezian, the One Beverly Hills project and American Dream Miami
Before this year, Triple Five Group hadn’t made a blip on the Los Angeles development radar. But two big moves in the last six months have put the developer on L.A.’s star map.
News broke in April that the Edmonton, Canada-based firm was in talks to buy the 47-acre Aerojet Rocketdyne facility in Warner Center for $150 million.
Then earlier this month, The Real Deal learned that Triple Five Group was in escrow with troubled Chinese developer Dalian Wanda Group to buy its One Beverly Hills condo and hotel project.
The One Beverly Hills project is valued at $1.2 billion, meaning that if both sales close by next spring, Triple Five Group will have dropped $1.35 billion in L.A. in just one year.
So who’s behind Triple Five Group and what is driving their L.A. moves?
Triple Five was founded by the Edmonton, Canada-based Ghermezian family. The family, which still runs the business, is interested in L.A. because they see it as an attractive market and want to maintain a “strong pipeline” of projects in the works, according to Reuben Benhaghnazar of Reuben Realty, who has represented Triple Five in negotiations for both the One Beverly Hills and Aerojet Rocketdyne sites.
“They like the demographics,” he said. “It’s a high-income area, people want to move here, live here, there’s the sex appeal of Hollywood and celebrity.”
Triple Five couldn’t be reached for comment.
Benhaghnazar said he expects to wrap up the One Beverly Hills deal by Halloween. He didn’t have an official timeline for the Aerojet Rocketdyne site, but said he hopes to wrap up that deal early next year. There is healthy interest from potential investors looking to join in on the One Beverly Hills deal, he said.
“It seemed a lot of people didn’t have the courage to move forward with One Beverly Hills and now everyone wants to get involved,” Reuben said.
Triple Five Group is an umbrella company for the Ghermezian family’s business interests. Jacob Ghermezian, who emigrated from to Canada from Iran with his wife and four sons in the late 1950s, founded the company in 1972. Before Triple Five, Ghermezian was a rug merchant in Iran. He founded Triple Five’s predecessor company in the 1960s as part of an oil venture, which Triple Five is still involved with, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Ghermezian raised funds for his first retail development —the West Edmonton Mall — through a series of land deals. A decade later, in 1992, he opened Triple Five’s most famous retail development, the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota.
Today, Jacob’s grandson Don Ghermezian is the CEO of Triple Five and his son Nader Ghermezian is chairman. While Triple Five has its hands in a number of businesses, including financial advisory in Canada, retail development remains its bread and butter.
It’s two largest recent projects are the American Dream Meadowlands in New Jersey and the American Dream Miami mall in Florida. To call them “malls” is a bit of an understatement. Both, like Triple Five’s Minnesota and Edmonton malls, will feature amusement parks and other entertainment offerings.
American Dream Meadowlands has started and stalled over the last 16 years and it will cost around $5 billion on completion, according to Costar. Triple Five secured $1.2 billion in tax-exempt bonds and a $1.6 billion private construction loan for the project last year.
It’s scheduled to open in April 2019, a target plenty of New Jerseyans have expressed skepticism over, according to the New Jersey Star-Ledger. Nearly half of the 3.2-million-square-foot development is dedicated to entertainment. It’s most notable amenity? A 16-story-tall indoor ski slope.
American Dream Miami, which Triple Five revealed in 2015, is slated to be nearly twice that size — 6.2 million square feet — and cost $4 billion to complete. The Miami-Dade County Commission gave final approval for the project in May. The project will take up 174 acres, include 2,000 hotel rooms, another 16-story ski slope, a 20-slide waterpark, and a 14-screen 3D movie theater, among other entertainment facilities.
While Triple Five has stated it will not need public money for the Miami project, it remains unclear if the company will continue to develop it using only private funds.
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