Orange County’s largest accounting firm is staying put.
The Costa Mesa office of Deloitte & Touche LLP signed a 12-year lease deal to stay at Park Tower, the 337,000-square-foot South Coast Plaza tower that bears the accounting firm’s name.
Deloitte’s renewal is for 125,000 square feet. The accounting firm takes up about six and a half floors at the 17-floor tower at 695 Town Center Drive.
The tower also is the local headquarters for Los Angeles-based law firm Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker LLP.
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Park Tower: Deloitte signed for 12 years |
Park Tower is one of three high-rise office buildings owned by C.J. Segerstrom & Sons across the street from the family run company’s South Coast Plaza.
Deloitte employs about 750 people in OC,more than twice the size of its nearest accounting firm competitor, according to the Business Journal list.
Most of Deloitte’s OC workers are at Park Tower, though some will be moved to the high-rise from MacArthur Place, as part of a consolidation.
The big lease renewal takes one potential anchor tenant off the list for the developers who are starting to build towers around John Wayne Airport.
For Deloitte, though, the deal may end up seeming like a move,its space at Park Tower is getting a major overhaul.
A one-year interior redesign project of Deloitte’s office space has just begun, as part of the lease renewal.
One floor has been gutted, with employees shuttled to different floors while the remodeling takes place.
San Francisco-based Gensler Associates is handling the project.
Many accounting firms of Deloitte’s size would balk at staying put during the remodeling. The preference usually is to leave their old office on Friday and show up Monday morning at the new space, said Stanley Taeger, director of office property management for the Offices of South Coast Plaza.
The fact that Deloitte isn’t going that route is a sign of the building’s appeal and location near South Coast Plaza, he said.
Deloitte also has forged a long relationship with the landlord. The company has been operating out of the tower since it opened in 1979.
In fact, Deloitte and its predecessors have been operating out of Segerstrom properties for the past 44 years. The first lease between the companies was for an office in Santa Ana in the early 1960s, according to Henry Segerstrom, managing partner of C.J. Segerstrom & Sons.
Terms of the lease, which runs through 2018, weren’t disclosed. Don Finkelstein of Finkelstein Associates in Maitland, Fla., represented Deloitte, while Seger-strom represented itself.
Internet Marketer Renews
Another big tenant also just renewed its lease.
Internet automotive marketer Autobytel Inc., No. 69 on the Business Journal’s list of largest OC-based public companies by sales, signed a lease for 60,715 square feet for its corporate headquarters at Colton Plaza.
The five-year lease is for two properties at Colton Plaza, 18872 and 18952 MacArthur Blvd., just across the street from John Wayne Airport.
Autobytel’s renewal deal includes sign rights at the top of the building, as well as tenant improvement incentives and parking at the site.
Autobytel is the largest tenant at Colton Plaza. The company, which posted $125 million in revenue last year, employs about 230 people locally.
The company, which operates Web sites that link auto buyers to dealerships, was represented in the lease deal by executive vice president and branch manager Royce Sharf and managing director Michael Props of Studley Inc.’s Irvine office.
Colton Plaza landlord, Colton Co., was represented in-house by John McClintock.
Senior housing is expected to get a lot of attention from the developers of Rancho Mission Viejo LLC’s last big piece of land available for homes.
More than 14,000 homes are due to be built on parts of the remaining 22,815-acre swath of land in South County owned by the O’Neill, Avery and Moiso families.
About 17,000 acres of that land will be preserved as open space.
Of those homes expected to be built during the next two to three decades, about 6,000 are set to be for seniors.
The developers cite favorable demographics for senior housing with the aging of baby boomers.
Initial plans for the first of five phases of the Rancho Mission Viejo development,totaling about 810 acres near Ortega Highway and Antonio Parkway,were announced late last month.
Senior living housing makes up a large part of this initial phase of construction, which isn’t set to begin for several years.
Of the 1,170 homes slated for the first phase, 552 are slotted for senior housing. A retirement center is part of the mix.
