The Newport Beach office of Australia’s Dexus Property Group said last June that they were looking to spend $100 million or so on Southern California deals.
So far they’ve spent about $40 million, after closing on an industrial building just outside Orange County.
It’s the second big acquisition for the real estate investment trust valued at close to $11 billion.
Dexus said late last month it bought a 278,000-square-foot retail and warehouse building in La Mirada.
The building, just off the Santa Ana (I-5) Freeway in Los Angeles County, traded hands for about $26 million, or about $95 per square foot.
Irvine’s LBA Realty was the seller, according to reports.
The 16.7-acre property—which includes 120,000 square feet of showroom space and 140,000 square feet of warehouse space, in addition to some offices—is the headquarters of Living Spaces Furniture LLC. The furniture retailer has a 10-year lease at the property, which began in 2006.
The buy follows a deal for a 157,329-square-foot multi-tenant industrial property in City of Industry for about $14 million.
Those deals came months after a transaction of a different sort. Last June, the operations and staff of Newport Beach’s Master Development Corp. were folded into Dexus, one of the largest commercial property owners in Australia.
Master Development—best known of late locally for its industrial projects in Corona and Santa Ana—essentially became the U.S. management office of Dexus, which had been operating out of Chicago but was looking to make a bigger push into the West Coast market.
At the time the deal was struck, officials told the Business Journal that Dexus had set aside $100 million for the Newport Beach office to invest in the next year.
After the company sells off some real estate east of the Rocky Mountains, Dexus could have close to $600 million to spend on West Coast deals, officials said last year.
KBS Still Busy
The latest initial public offering from Newport Beach’s KBS Realty Advisors is up and running.
The company recently announced that its offering for KBS Real Estate Investment Trust III became effective. The non-traded fund is looking to raise as much as $2.8 billion from investors on an ongoing basis.
Paperwork for the fund first was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission about a year ago.
KBS Realty has used similar investment vehicles to fuel a flurry of headline-making deals in the past few years, including buys of skyscrapers in Chicago, Los Angeles, Denver and Louisville, Ky.
Last month, another KBS fund entered into an agreement to buy 601 Tower at Carlson Center, a 288,000-square-foot office in Minnetonka, Minn. The sale price for the 15-story building is $54.4 million.
The building is 90% leased and is being sold by the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association-College Retirement Equities Fund, according to local reports.
In Sacramento, KBS is under contract to buy a two-building office complex, totaling about 235,000 square feet, called the Gateway Corporate Center. That complex, which is 91% leased, is set to sell for $47.5 million, according to regulatory filings.
Merage Rebranding
Newport Beach’s Stoneridge Capital Partners has a new name and some new properties in its portfolio.
Stoneridge, a real estate investment company that’s bought about $250 million worth of commercial properties since mid-2009, recently changed its name to MIG Real Estate.
The MIG stands for Merage Investment Group. The company’s chairman is Hot Pockets creator Paul Merage, namesake of the University of California, Irvine, business school.
MIG Real Estate is funded by the Merage family. Greg Merage, nephew of Paul, is chief executive.
Along with a new name, the company recently announced the purchase of Vista Commons, a 99,000-square-foot neighborhood retail center in Las Vegas, and two La Jolla offices that total 138,000 square feet. Terms of the deals weren’t disclosed.
Ad Move
Tenant improvement work is under way for the new Irvine offices of advertising firm Wunderman Southern California, according to brokers that worked on the deal.
Wunderman, which is OC’s third-largest advertising firm based on revenue, recently signed a full-floor, 25,000-square-foot lease at 2010 Main St. in Irvine, near John Wayne Airport.
Work on the space began last week, according to Orion Property Partners’ Rich Essen, which represented the landlord, San Francisco’s Shorenstein Properties LLC.
CB Richard Ellis Group Inc.’s Justin Hill and Mark Friend represented Wunderman.
