Hilco Development emerges as winning bidder for the Ziggurat 

Orange County’s most famous white elephant is not long for this world.

The brutalist concrete monument known as the Ziggurat at 24000 Avila Road in Laguna Niguel is off the auction block and in the hands of 33-year-old developer Cameron Hildreth, The Real Deal has learned.

Hildreth’s Long Beach-based construction startup, Hilco Development Services, placed the winning bid in a federal auction last month to buy the vacant Chet Holifield Federal Building and surrounding 90 acres of land in the south Orange County city for $177 million, or just under $2 million per acre, according to a bid acceptance letter shared with TRD.

What exactly will Hilco do with it?

“Obviously, we don’t know,” Hildreth said. “That’s the big question.”

But one thing is certain, according to Hildreth: the seven-story Mesopotamia-style pyramid has got to go.

Hilco has already applied to remove the historic covenant from the property’s title, clearing the path to demolish the 1 million-square-foot fortress and several other smaller structures on the parcel.

That’s all part of the ground rules the U.S. General Services Administration laid out in its invitation for bids earlier this year after the federal agency failed in its previous attempts to hand off the Ziggurat to a buyer who would preserve it.

The property looked a lot more appealing to Hilco after that change, Hildreth said.

“It’s one of the largest pieces of land that’s still available in this area,” he said. “And the city of Laguna Niguel has a lot of opportunity.”

The ambitious millennial-run development firm — previously known only as “Bidder #2” — prevailed over two other anonymous bidders in an online auction that unfolded in slow motion over five months beginning in June.

MGR Real Estate’s Anthony Freasier, who brokered the deal for Hilco, said the firm was prepared for bidding to go on a lot longer than it did.

“$177 million sounds like a lot of money, but it’s still under $2 million an acre for the land,” Freasier said. “So that leaves a lot of lift for whatever we decide we want to push the property towards, whether it’s housing or commercial use.”

That process will kick into gear after Hilco closes the deal. It has six months to do so, according to the auction rules.

Parcels of this size are hard to come by in Southern California. Five Point Holdings sold 84 acres in Irvine last year for $357.8 million, or $4.3 million per acre, as TRD previously reported.

Hildreth, who previously worked as a construction manager for megadevelopers Rick Caruso and The Irvine Company, declined to share how Hilco plans to finance the acquisition, but said the company has backing from a private family investor and “some big players that are very, very interested.”

Hilco has grown its portfolio quickly since its founding in 2017 and currently has just under $1 billion of projects completed or in the pipeline, including multifamily developments in Long Beach and an office building in Costa Mesa, according to the company.

But the Ziggurat catapults the firm up the industry ladder.

“With the current debt market, a lot of institutions who we thought might be players thought it wasn’t worth it,” Freasier said. “But for us, this is pretty career-changing.”

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