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# Santa Monica Clock Tower sells at a steep discount
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/santa-monica-clock-tower-sells-at-a-steep-discount/
- Published: 2026-10-30T19:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-30T18:59:59.000Z
- Author: Matthew Hall
- Tags: Business, Downtown Santa Monica, #socials

An entity tied to the Mani brothers has bought the Santa Monica Clock Tower for $28.5 million, about half of what the previous owner paid in 2019, The Real Deal reported Wednesday.

The 12-story Art Deco office building at 225 Santa Monica Blvd., once the city's tallest, had been in receivership after owner Rockwood Capital defaulted on its loan. Court documents identify the buyer as an entity connected to Simon, Daniel and Joseph Mani of West Hollywood-based Mani Brothers Real Estate Group.

Rockwood, now part of Harrison Street Asset Management, paid $58 million for the century-old building in 2019\. It bought the tower from Sorgente Group of America and assumed about $27 million in commercial mortgage-backed securities debt.

The loan went into special servicing after missing its May 2025 maturity date and landed in court that September. Special servicer Rialto Capital sued, alleging Rockwood owed about $25 million.

The building was 43% occupied as of September 2024, down from 100% when the loan was issued in 2015, according to Morningstar figures, but the offices did not generate enough income to cover the debt. Morningstar valued the tower at $49 million in 2015 but cut that figure while the loan was in special servicing.

Office space has been a tough sell in Santa Monica recently.

Santa Monica recorded the largest occupancy loss in West Los Angeles in the second quarter amid pullbacks in the tech and media sectors, leaving one-third of its office inventory available for lease, according to Colliers' second-quarter 2026 West Los Angeles office report.

Colliers put the city's office vacancy rate at 28.5%, up from 25% in its third-quarter 2025 data, while availability rose to 33.4% from 32.9%. Santa Monica lost about 265,000 square feet of occupied space in the second quarter, after losing about 234,000 square feet the quarter before, the report said.

Average direct asking rent in Santa Monica was $5.49 per square foot per month, or $5.95 for Class A space, according to Colliers. Across West Los Angeles, the firm reported 24.6% vacancy, unchanged from the first quarter. Century City had the region's lowest vacancy at 13.3%.

A RAND Corp. study put Santa Monica's office vacancy above 20% in June, second only to Culver City among four Westside cities.

RAND also found the Promenade 31% vacant in August across 37 retail properties, based on CoStar data. Buildings larger than 30,000 square feet were 47% vacant, compared with 12% for those smaller than 10,000 square feet, and four properties were completely empty.

Citywide taxable sales fell 32.8% from 2015 to 2025, from $3.24 billion to $2.18 billion in 2015 dollars, according to state tax data analyzed by RAND. Clothing and accessories sales fell 75%, a loss of $327.7 million.

Countywide

Across Los Angeles, direct office vacancy was 16.4% in the third quarter, down slightly from 16.5% in the second quarter but up from 15.9% a year earlier, according to Kidder Mathews. Average asking rent held at $3.50 per square foot per month.

The market absorbed about 235,000 square feet of office space in the quarter but remained down about 1.3 million square feet for the year. Leasing totaled about 12.2 million square feet through the first nine months, down 37% from the same period in 2025\. No new office space was delivered, though 2.31 million square feet was under construction.

Kidder Mathews cited businesses relocating out of California, remote work and an oversupply of Class B properties as major drags on the market. It named Century City as the region's most desirable office submarket.

The quarter's biggest countywide sale was the former Sony Pictures Animation campus in Culver City, a three-building, 198,126-square-foot complex that Fortress Investment Group bought at auction for $71.3 million.