By Eric Engelbert
90 Years of Vitamins. Now 281 Homes.
For decades, a 13.75-acre industrial campus at 5600 Beach Boulevard in Buena Park quietly churned out billions of vitamin tablets and trained Amway distributors from around the world. Most Buena Park residents drove past it every day without giving it a second thought. That is about to change. By the end of this decade, the site will hold 281 new homes. The story of how it got there touches on 90 years of California business history, a $60 million sale, an 18-month entitlement sprint, and one of Orange County's most active real estate investment firms. Browse new construction homes in Buena Park.
The Nutrilite Campus: A Brief History
The roots of 5600 Beach Boulevard go back to 1934, when Carl F. Rehnborg founded what he initially called the California Vitamin Company. Rehnborg had spent years in China during the 1910s and 1920s, where he witnessed the connection between nutrition and health firsthand. Back in California, he began formulating supplements and renamed the company Nutrilite in 1939.
The address was once known as Grand Avenue before Buena Park's streets were renumbered. Nutrilite established its California manufacturing and training hub there, and over time the campus grew into a two-building complex totaling about 370,000 square feet. The facility was used for distribution, R&D, quality assurance, and Nutrilite's well-known Experience Center, where visitors could tour the facility and learn about the brand's history and science.
The Amway connection is just as storied. Jay Van Andel and Richard DeVos began selling Nutrilite products as independent distributors in 1949. They went on to found Amway in 1959, and by 1972 Amway had acquired a controlling interest in Nutrilite, with full ownership following in 1994. For the next three decades, the Buena Park campus operated as a division of one of the world's largest direct-sales companies, producing up to 10 billion tablets, capsules, and softgels annually across its California operations. By 2025, Amway was ready to let the campus go.
The $60 Million Sale and the Sale-Leaseback
In February 2025, Shopoff Realty Investments and its partner Lennar Homes purchased the property for $60 million. At roughly $4.3 million per acre, the transaction worked out to about $162 per square foot of existing building space. That figure reflects the land's future potential, not the value of the industrial buildings sitting on it.
To finance the acquisition, Shopoff secured a $49 million loan arranged by JLL Capital Markets, with the debt advisory team led by Senior Director Jamie Kline and Associate Kyle White. The remaining approximately $11 million came from equity.
Amway did not walk away overnight. The company signed a two-year sale-leaseback agreement, allowing its Nutrilite training and distribution operations to continue at the site through the end of 2026. This arrangement gave Amway time to transition its operations while providing Shopoff with rental income to cover holding costs during the entitlement process. It is a structure common in large corporate real estate transactions, and in this case it gave both sides exactly what they needed.
Who Is Shopoff Realty, and What Do They Actually Do?
Shopoff Realty Investments is headquartered at 18565 Jamboree Road in Irvine, California. William Shopoff founded the company in 1992, and it has operated under several names over the years, including Asset Recovery Fund and Eastbridge Partners, before becoming The Shopoff Group and eventually Shopoff Realty Investments. As of late 2023, the firm had approximately $3 billion in assets under management. They were also named one of the 2026 Best Places to Work in Orange County.
Shopoff is not a homebuilder. Their specialty is entitlement: buying underutilized or commercially zoned land, navigating the rezoning and approval process to convert it to a higher-value use, then selling or partnering the entitled land to a builder who takes it the rest of the way. Recent OC examples include a 29-acre former oil tank farm in Huntington Beach where Shopoff secured approvals for 200-plus homes and a boutique hotel, and the former Westminster Mall redevelopment where the firm is working on a project expected to deliver more than 2,000 homes.
At 5600 Beach Boulevard, Shopoff brought Lennar in as its construction partner from day one. Rather than going through the approval process alone and finding a buyer afterward, Shopoff and Lennar acquired the site together, with the understanding that Lennar would take over construction once entitlements were in hand. This is not a distant institutional investor parachuting into Buena Park. It is an OC-based firm operating in its own backyard, with a Miami-based national builder handling the build-out.
The Entitlement Process: From Industrial to Residential in 17 Months
The site was zoned Light Industrial (ML) with a Light Industrial general plan designation when Shopoff bought it in February 2025. Converting nearly 14 acres of industrial land to a high-density residential community in California means a general plan amendment, a zone change, a CEQA environmental review, and approval from multiple city bodies.
The project required a general plan amendment from Light Industrial to High-Density Residential and a zone change from ML to RM-20 (Medium-Density Multi-Family Residential). The environmental review resulted in a Mitigated Negative Declaration rather than a full Environmental Impact Report, which signals that potential impacts could be addressed through specific mitigation measures rather than triggering the lengthier EIR process. For a project replacing a 370,000-square-foot industrial campus with a walkable residential community near a train station, that determination is not surprising.
Because the site sits in a flight path corridor near Fullerton Airport, the Orange County Airport Commission also had to sign off. All three bodies, the Airport Commission, the Planning Commission, and the City Council, approved the project unanimously.
Entitlement costs for a project of this scale are not publicly disclosed, but they are substantial. A typical industrial-to-residential conversion in Orange County involves CEQA documentation, traffic studies, noise and air quality analysis, civil engineering, legal review, community outreach, city application fees, and consultant teams working for more than a year. For a 13-plus-acre site with a general plan amendment, those combined costs frequently run into the millions before a single construction permit is issued. The Amway leaseback income helped offset those carrying costs considerably.
What Gets Built: 281 Homes Designed by KTGY
The architecture firm on the project is KTGY Architecture and Planning, an Irvine-based firm with a long track record on Southern California residential projects. Their renderings show a series of contemporary three-story buildings spread across a triangle-shaped site, with enhanced landscaping replacing the current expanse of asphalt and warehouse roofline.
59 three-story buildings
22 three-story buildings
1 four-story building
4 floor plans
Planned amenities include a community pool, recreation area, open space, and play areas. The senior affordable component is a requirement tied to the project's density and the city's housing obligations under state law. Those 50 units will be for-rent apartments serving lower-income seniors, separate from the market-rate townhomes and duplexes that Lennar will sell. You can see other active new development projects across the county on the OC New Developments page.
Location and Traffic Context
The site sits on Beach Boulevard, one of Orange County's primary north-south arterials, just west of the Buena Park Metrolink Station. Both Interstate 5 and State Route 91 are less than a mile away. That combination of commuter rail access and freeway proximity makes 5600 Beach Boulevard a genuinely transit-oriented development site, which is part of why the city was receptive to the rezoning.
Traffic is always a loud concern at residential entitlement hearings in North OC, and 5600 Beach Boulevard was no exception. Beach Boulevard carries heavy volumes, and adding hundreds of new residents will generate additional vehicle trips. At the same time, replacing a large industrial and distribution campus with a residential community typically reduces heavy truck movements significantly. Warehouse operations generate a disproportionate share of commercial vehicle traffic, particularly during delivery windows. The shift to residential near a Metrolink station distributes trips more evenly throughout the day and shifts some to transit.
The Mitigated Negative Declaration addressed traffic impacts and identified mitigation measures deemed sufficient to bring those impacts below a significant level under CEQA. The Airport Commission's involvement was driven by federal airspace review requirements for new residential structures in approach corridors, not by traffic or noise from the project itself.
What Happens Next
Amway and its Nutrilite division will finish clearing out of the campus by the end of 2026. Once they vacate, Lennar takes formal control of the site and begins demolition and grading. The first homes are expected to be available sometime in 2029, with full buildout running into 2030.
For buyers watching Buena Park's housing market, 5600 Beach Boulevard will represent a significant addition of for-sale inventory in a city that has not seen much new residential construction in recent years. Townhomes and duplexes from a national builder at a transit-adjacent location will appeal to first-time buyers, commuters, and anyone priced out of southern Orange County. Pricing has not been announced, but Lennar's comparable townhome communities in North OC in recent years have ranged from the high $700s to well over $1 million depending on size and finishes.
Keep an eye on this one. It has been 90 years in the making.
Interested in Buena Park New Construction?
Homes at 5600 Beach Boulevard are still a few years out, but new construction opportunities exist in Buena Park and across Orange County right now. Explore your options or reach out to our team for personalized guidance on timing, pricing, and how to position yourself when inventory like this comes to market.
