The owner of the Orange County Register has put a price tag of nearly $29 million on the paper’s headquarters in Santa Ana.
Freedom Communications Inc. late last month listed its headquarters at 625 N. Grand Ave. for sale along with an accompanying parking structure and an adjacent parcel of vacant land.
The 173,000-square-foot office, with five above-ground floors, plus a basement, overlooks the Santa Ana (5) Freeway about a mile from the Costa Mesa (55) Freeway.
The $28.9 million asking price works out to about $167 per square foot. Brokers with the Newport Beach office of CBRE Group Inc. have the listing for the property.
The Register currently occupies the entire building. The paper could lease back a portion of the property upon its sale, depending on a buyer’s preferences.
The property is “one of two office properties in Orange County for sale … that is capable of providing over 150,000 square feet of available space” to an owner-user, according to sales materials from CBRE, whose private capital group is marketing the office.
A time frame for a sale hasn’t been disclosed.
Freedom Chief Executive Aaron Kushner, who also is publisher of the Register, told employees of the daily in a memo last month that the company would likely move to another Santa Ana location if a sale of the property doesn’t include a lease-back provision.
The Register would need only two floors of the six-story building in a lease-back deal, according to CBRE.
The paper’s printing operations, which are in a low-rise building on a parcel next to the headquarters, aren’t part of the sale; neither are several parcels near the headquarters building that Freedom also owns.
The Register’s headquarters opened in 1986 at an estimated cost of about $25 million.
The paper’s founding owners, the Hoiles family, paid cash for the property, according to sources familiar with the paper’s operations.
Kushner’s 2100 Trust LLC, which took over Freedom’s operations in 2012, will likely use some of the proceeds from a sale to pay debt secured by the building, along with other obligations.
Sale Trend
The Register is the latest newspaper looking to shore up its balance sheet by offloading real estate holdings.
In the past year alone, the Washington Post put its downtown headquarters up for sale, while the owners of the Seattle Times, San Jose Mercury News, the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News sold their long-time headquarters.
Chicago-based Tribune Co., which owns the Los Angeles Times and other papers, is also said to be considering selling some of its real estate holdings, including a printing plant in Costa Mesa.
Increasingly, “many of the buildings that served as newspaper headquarters in cities around the country are being put on the market, as a struggling industry searches desperately for ways to increase revenue,” noted an October story in the New York Times—which sold its headquarters in 2009, raising $225 million.
The publisher spent about $27.3 million in November to buy the Press-Enterprise in Riverside in a deal that took longer than expected to close, reportedly because of financing issues.
Kushner also recently announced plans to launch a paper in Los Angeles, and sources say the publisher could also be eyeing Palm Springs as another potential market for expansion.
“We will continue to evolve and grow our Orange County Register business,” Kushner told employees in a recent memo.
“We have already made excellent progress in both reducing our debt and significantly increasing the funding levels of our pension plan. Exiting the real estate business to focus on the newspaper business will continue that progress,” the memo said.
Freedom sold a small office in Irvine last year that previously held the parent company’s headquarters and operations for some of its magazines. That sale raised about $2.7 million.
