Irvine’s Woodbury East housing development will be one of the busier areas in Orange County for new home construction in 2010, with William Lyon Homes Inc.’s Ivy development under way as well as a 685 home executive builder program being overseen by Irvine Company.
But the new construction also will have some competition from already built homes that are finally being put on the market.
Newport Beach-based California Real Estate Receiverships LLC is putting eight new homes at the Celadon development of Woodbury East up for sale, more than two years after the project opened.
Irvine-based John Laing Homes had headed up the Celadon project, but the company’s financial issues kept some of the homes from ever getting completed and sold. The builder filed for bankruptcy early this year.
California Real Estate Receiverships was put in charge of selling the Irvine assets, along with homes and land in 18 other developments that were in various stages of construction.
All told, there are 128 homes and 969 vacant lots formerly owned by John Laing that the receivership is looking to sell in California, Colorado and Arizona. The only other OC asset of John Laing that the receivership is handling is land at San Juan Capistrano’s Harbor Vista project.
Most of those nearly 1,100 homes and lots are now just coming on to the market, said Tom Grable, an agent for the receivership company and former executive with Newport Beach-based William Lyon Homes. He joined the receivership in June to help manage the John Laing assets.
The receivership is employing “a variety of means” to sell the properties, including an auction to sell about 40 homes in Marina del Rey, Grable said.
For the Celadon homes, it is hoping that the increased traffic at Woodbury East recently, due to the new construction, will bring in interested buyers. The one-time John Laing homes run from about 1,600 square feet to 1,800 square feet and are listed for sale in the $440,000 to $460,000 range. That’s about 20% below the original prices John Laing expected to sell the homes for.
The receivership hopes to dispose of all the assets by the end of March, according to Grable.
Snyder Langston Expands
SL Residential Inc., an affiliate of Irvine-based construction company Snyder Langston, has been expanding its work to include projects tailored to senior living.
The company recently completed construction on Valencia Terrace, a 203-unit, 275,000-square-foot full-service senior living apartment development in Corona.
The 9.4-acre project includes both independent and assisted living units. SL Residential served as the general contractor on the project on behalf of the project’s developer, Carlsbad-based Kisco Senior Living.
First American Execs
Santa Ana-based title insurer and business information provider First American Corp. is seeing a shake-up of its management team, a few months before a long-awaited spinoff is expected to take place.
First American recently announced the departure of Frank McMahon, chief executive of the company’s information solutions group.
The company also announced the appointment of Anand Nallathambi as president and chief operating officer of the information solutions group, which was responsible for $2.1 billion in revenue last year, or about one-third of First American’s total revenue.
Nallathambi previously served as president and chief executive of First Advantage Corp., a former majority-owned subsidiary of the company that’s now part of First American’s information solutions group.
First American said it has initiated a search to select a new chief executive for the information solution group. Nallathambi is a candidate for the position, according to the company.
McMahon, formerly the vice chairman and chief financial officer of First American and a one-time managing director at Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., had been in his current role for 19 months.
He had been expected to retain the chief executive position at a slimmed-down First American, after the company’s larger title insurance business is spun off into a new publicly-traded company.
The spinoff, which has been in the works for more than a year, is tentatively scheduled to take place in April.
Erika Records Inc., a producer of vinyl records, will be moving its headquarters from Downey to Orange County next year after signing a lease for a midsize building in Buena Park.
The company, which makes records for independent artists as well as for larger labels, is moving to a 36,000-square-foot industrial building at 6300 Caballero Blvd.
The five-year lease is for $859,320, which puts the monthly lease rate at about 40 cents per square foot.
The building will be the new headquarters for Erika Records and also will be used for the manufacturing of its products. In addition to the normal-size 5-inch, 7-inch, 10-inch and 12-inch vinyl records, the company claims to have been the first in the industry to make 13-inch records, likely good news for when the next Spinal Tap album is released.
The tenant had been searching for a new location in Los Angeles County as well as in OC, but it chose Buena Park due to the city’s business friendly attitude toward manufacturing facilities, according to Alex Blecksmith, an associate in the commerce office of Colliers International.
The record company is believed to be the first to take part in Buena Park’s Business Retention and Attraction Program, which helps industrial businesses expand or retrofit existing buildings and purchase equipment.
Blecksmith and Mike Grady, an associate in Colliers’s Torrance office, represented Erika Records in the lease. The landlord, Caballero Boulevard Properties LLC of Los Angeles, was represented by Rick McGeagh and Josh Bonwell of CB Richard Ellis Group Inc.’s Torrance and Anaheim offices.
Colliers Moves
The Irvine office of brokerage Colliers International has a new location in Jamboree Center.
The company, which counts about 25 brokers and 14 other staff members, moved offices across the street to 3 Park Plaza last month. Colliers is leasing about 11,700 square feet of space at the Irvine Co. building.
