Cedars-Sinai Buys Beverly Connection for $270M

Cedars-Sinai Medical Center has acquired the Beverly Connection shopping center for a reported $270 million, adding roughly 10 acres of prime West Los Angeles real estate to its long-term expansion plans.

The medical center announced the purchase on March 13. The seller was Ashkenazy Acquisition Corp., a New York-based retail property owner that bought the Beverly Connection in 2014 for $260 million. At $270 million, the deal values the 340,000-square-foot center at approximately $790 per square foot, according to the Real Deal, which first reported the sale price.

The shopping center sits at 100 North La Cienega Blvd., on the east side of the street between Beverly Boulevard and Third Street, one block east of the Cedars-Sinai campus in Beverly Grove. For a health system looking to expand without relocating, the proximity made the site an obvious target.

“The strategic acquisition of the Beverly Connection will provide long-term options for Cedars-Sinai to revitalize our medical campus and provide the most advanced care to our patients and the community well into the next century,” said Peter Slavin, chief executive of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and the broader Cedars-Sinai Health System, in the announcement.

Cedars-Sinai said it has no near-term plans to close the shopping center, and a spokesperson declined to offer additional comment on the transaction. A representative for Ashkenazy Acquisition also declined to comment.

Chris Maling, principal of retail capital markets at the downtown Los Angeles office of Avison Young, confirmed he was familiar with the deal and noted that the transaction was off-market. No formal listing ever appeared. That detail suggests Cedars-Sinai pursued the site directly, rather than winning a competitive bid process, which helps explain how a medical center ended up as the buyer of a neighborhood retail property.

The Beverly Connection opened in 1989 with a format that set it apart from its more prominent neighbor, the Beverly Center, across La Cienega. Where the Beverly Center went vertical and enclosed, the Connection leaned into a hybrid layout: outdoor walkways across three interior levels, a small indoor mall section on the north side, and street-facing stores on the southwest corner and along the parking structure. A Ralphs grocery and a Cost Plus anchored the original tenant mix, with a cinema complex added a few years after opening.

The theater didn’t survive. A significant renovation in 2007 removed the cinema, reshaping the center’s footprint. When Ashkenazy Acquisition took over in 2014, the company modernized the parking structure while keeping the fundamental design intact, including a large central ramp that has remained a persistent headache for shoppers. Maling put it plainly: “Parking is an ongoing issue for customers.”

That operational friction, combined with the broader pressure facing community shopping centers in a retail environment that has shifted heavily toward e-commerce and mixed-use development, likely factored into Ashkenazy’s willingness to sell.

For Cedars-Sinai, the acquisition is less a retail investment than a land bank. Health systems with dense urban campuses routinely face the same problem: there is nowhere left to build. Acquiring adjacent property, even at a premium, gives administrators the flexibility to plan clinical expansions, research facilities, or support infrastructure on a timeline measured in decades rather than years. Slavin’s statement referenced care “well into the next century,” which signals the institution is buying optionality, not square footage it needs tomorrow.

What the site eventually becomes is an open question. Cedars-Sinai has given no indication of a specific program or timeline, and the current retail tenants appear to be operating without interruption for now. Any major redevelopment of a 10-acre parcel in Beverly Grove would require significant city planning involvement and community input, a process that typically unfolds over years.

For the moment, the CVS at the northwest corner is still filling prescriptions, and the Ralphs is still open. But the ownership of that block has shifted from a New York real estate firm to one of the largest health systems on the West Coast, and that tends to be the kind of change that looks small at first.