➤ Key Highlights
Asana Partners acquired Seacliff Village, a fully leased power center in Huntington Beach.
The price was $151M — Orange County’s largest retail transaction in roughly a year.
It is part of a June surge: a Chicago-area grocery center traded above $54M, about 2x its 2021 price after redevelopment.
Institutions are naming grocery-anchored and open-air their #1 retail format and raising nine-figure funds for it.
➤ Signal
Retail has gone from value-trap to institutional conviction buy — and the bid is concentrated in fully leased, necessity- and convenience-driven open-air centers.
A year ago, $151M for an Orange County power center would have been a contrarian trade. Now it’s the consensus. Years of near-zero retail development left a scarcity of quality open-air centers exactly as consumer foot traffic and necessity tenancy proved durable. Institutions chasing yield and inflation-protected, mark-to-market leases (double-digit spreads on renewals) have found their format. This is the live evidence behind Altus’s June 22 read that retail led all CRE sectors.
Cap rates for leased, grocery- and necessity-anchored open-air centers will keep compressing as capital crowds in. The risk is selection: institutions are paying full price for the best centers while leaving second-tier, big-box-exposed retail behind. The supply scarcity is structural — almost no new open-air is being built — which supports pricing power for existing owners.
➤ Takeaway
Retail’s quiet leadership is now loud: institutional capital is paying up for the open-air centers nobody is building.
Source: Asana Partners / ICSC — June 24, 2026
