$8M Acquisition Loan on a Downtown Brea Retail Property

The first recorded loan at 300 South Brea Boulevard was a $135,000 private party mortgage in 1982. In April 2026, Shinhan Bank America recorded an $8,000,000 acquisition deed of trust on the property, executed April 6 and recorded April 8. The buyer, Gaon Investment LLC, purchased the property on March 26, 2026 at a recorded price of $9,500,000 from Brea Imperial Venture LLC.

The address itself takes some care. It sits in downtown Brea and spans multiple parcels, and the businesses publicly tied to it are car washes: Brea Express Car Wash appears operating there per directory listings updated July 2026, and a predecessor operation at the address, Gateway Auto Spa, is marked closed. No public source confirms which operation occupies the specific parcel securing the loan, and no building square footage is published for it. Those gaps are reported as gaps.

What the recorded debt history shows clearly is the lending ecosystem this property has lived in. Wilshire State Bank recorded loans in 2001 and 2004, Hanmi Bank in 2007 and again in 2009 on an SBA refinance, and Commonwealth Business Bank on an SBA refinance in 2012. Private party trust deeds arrived in 2017 and 2020, a BBVA leasehold deed of trust in 2020, a Bay Area Employment Development leasehold instrument in 2023, and a $4,297,944 Meadows Bank loan in July 2025. Ten distinct lenders appear across four decades, with the SBA programs doing much of the work in the middle years.

The 2026 loan continues a thread that runs through that history: Korean American banks. Wilshire State, Hanmi, and Commonwealth Business all served that banking corridor, and Shinhan Bank America is the US subsidiary of South Korea's Shinhan Financial Group, headquartered in New York, with commercial real estate and SBA 7(a) and 504 lending among its published products. This is Shinhan's first closing tracked on LoanList. The buyer is local: state records show Gaon Investment LLC formed in October 2017 and registered in Brea, classified as a property investment and management company.

Within the tracked Orange County record the loan ranks 8th of 25 by size, in the middle of a tight cluster of spring retail closings: $8,000,000 from Tri Counties Bank in Foothill Ranch, $8,125,000 from Wells Fargo in Laguna Beach, $7,679,711 from Bank of Hope in Anaheim, and $6,800,000 from HCN Bank in Lake Forest.

For owner operators of automotive and service retail, this record is the market in miniature: community banks, SBA structures, and relationship lenders have financed this corner for forty years, and the newest entrant wrote the largest check yet. Buyers of similar properties in north Orange County are choosing from that same bench.