As Tricon American Homes, a spinoff of Canada-based Tricon Capital Group that rents out single-family homes, has quickly grown operations in Orange County, it has struggled to find a home of its own.
That’s no longer the case.
It recently signed its largest lease to date, for a headquarters facility at 33.7 North, a Tustin creative office campus that was just purchased for $23.5 million by Foster City-based SteelWave LLC, a deal that first reported in last week’s issue of the Business Journal.
The roughly 100,000-square-foot building along Red Hill Avenue has been rebranded as AIRspace by its new owners.
The Santa Ana-based company has moved four times in just as many years “all because of growth,” said President Kevin Baldridge, who before joining Tricon American a couple years ago ran the apartment division of Orange County’s largest rental property owner, Irvine Co.
Tricon isn’t looking to move again once it settles into the Tustin facility since the deal allows for future growth.
It plans to only occupy half of its 78,000-square-foot lease at first, subletting the rest to one or several companies.
“We want to give ourselves room to grow,” Baldridge said.
The company will take up approximately 45,000 square feet at AIRspace; nearly double what it occupies now in its current office.
“We really like the location we are in now, but we’ve been running out of space,” so much so that it had to rent a suite in a neighboring office building, Baldridge said. “We chose to rent a much larger space to assemble back together and come together as company.”
The company and its 225 employees will move into the Tustin campus next year. Expect that figure to grow, as the firm “is continuing to hire locally.”
Tricon has a portfolio of more than 18,000 homes in 10 states including California.
“It’s been great to work with SteelWave on the build out of our space. We are excited with what they have planned for the overall campus, and we are taking a similar approach,” Baldridge said. “It’s about building a place that makes our employees happy to come to work.”
JLL is the project manager for the build out at the Tustin building, which is designed by Irvine-based Shubin Donaldson Architects.
SteelWave paid about $49 million for AIRspace and an adjacent building at the intersection of Red Hill Avenue and Bell Avenue. The two buildings total about 223,000 square feet.
