Yokohama Tire Corp. plans to move its corporate headquarters from Fullerton to a newly built industrial facility in Chino later this year.
The North American manufacturing and marketing arm of Yokohama Rubber Co. in Tokyo is in the process of selling the headquarters in Fullerton, where it has been based since 1986.
The 400,000-square-foot building, at 601 S. Acacia Ave., is expected to trade hands for a little more than $40 million, according to real estate sources.
New York-based KTR Capital Partners is under contract to buy it and plans a substantial renovation of the property once Yokohama moves out, according to sources.
The plan is to renovate the property—one of the larger industrial facilities in North Orange County—into a multitenant building.
The vacancy rate for Orange County buildings 200,000 square feet and larger is 2.3%, with six buildings now available, according to marketing materials from CBRE Group Inc., whose brokers have the listing for the property.
The Fullerton building also serves as a regional distribution center for the company, whose parent is among the largest tire makers in the world.
The company makes tires for high-performance, light truck, passenger car, commercial truck and bus, and off-road mining and construction applications.
The workforce at the Fullerton facility is estimated at 150. The company could not be reached for comment last week.
Building in Chino
Yokohama is heading to a new and larger industrial property in San Bernardino County.
The company recently inked a lease to move into a 658,000-square-foot building in Chino that is being finished.
The building is part of Empire Gateway, a four-building, nearly 2-million-square-foot development going up just off the 71 Freeway. It’s about 9 miles from the Orange County line and 25 miles from Yokohama’s facility in Fullerton.
The Chino development—billed as the largest speculative industrial development in the Inland Empire—is owned by Atlanta-based Invesco Ltd., which bought the site last year from Sares-Regis Group in Irvine.
Sares-Regis continues to manage the construction of the 125-acre project, which is opening in phases this year. Yokohama’s building is the second largest of the four buildings going up at the logistics center.
Yokohama is expected to move into the Chino building later this year, according to Thomas Taylor, senior executive vice president for the Ontario office of Colliers International, who represented Invesco in the lease with colleagues Steven Bellitti, Josh Hayes and Summer Coulter.
The move to Chino is the second notable real estate shift taking place in the U.S. for Yokohama Tire.
West Point Building
The company is building a manufacturing plant in West Point, Miss., where it expects to make about a million tires a year for commercial trucks and buses once production begins in late 2015.
The West Point plant will be the first U.S. manufacturing facility built by the company, which acquired a plant in Salem, Va., in 1992 for $80 million.
It bought the Salem plant from Mohawk Rubber Co., an Akron, Ohio-based company that Yokohama Tire’s parent acquired in 1989 and merged with the Fullerton unit in 1992.
Yokohama Tire also has been importing tires from Japan and Thailand for sale in North America.
Yokohama Rubber Co. has close to $6 billion in annual sales, with Yokohama Tire’s sales representing nearly a quarter of that amount.
