“10,027! How crazy that we just went over 10k full time employees…. Proud to be an American company and providing jobs,” said loanDepot founder and CEO Anthony Hsieh in a recent LinkedIn post.
The mortgage lender—which has added several thousand workers this year—doesn’t need a bigger HQ for now as most loanDepot employees are working remotely.
But Hsieh, whose fortune the Business Journal estimates at around $2.3 billion, has a new home with a few extra rooms for employees if the need arises.
A Variety report late last week pegged him as the buyer of a nearly 19,000SF, six-bedroom mansion in Crystal Cove. Trading at a reported $61M, it’s the priciest-ever home sale in OC.
October was a big month for Big Mike Harrah.
The OC Register late last week broke the news that the owner of Caribou Industries finally landed Amazon for Santa Ana, albeit not as originally planned.
After courting the ecommerce giant during its national HQ2 sweepstakes a few years ago, Harrah last week got Amazon to buy one of his larger area properties—the Register’s old printing press facility along Grand Ave.
Harrah paid close to $60 million for that building and the Register’s former HQ, a six-story office next door, in a series of transactions in 2014 and 2015. Amazon’s reportedly paying $63.2 million just for the printing press facility, where it plans a last-mile distribution center.
It’s not the only big sale in the city for Harrah of late. Earlier in October, records indicate he sold off the 10-story 888 N Main St. office tower to L.A.-based Alliant Strategic Investments, a residential developer with a focus on Opportunity Zones and affordable housing.
That building, expected to be the first major adaptive reuse apartment in Downtown Santa Ana with 148 rental units, traded for $54 million and nearly $365,000 per unit; for more details see next week’s print edition of the Business Journal.
Readers of the Insider know that James Glidewell can tell a good tale; the July 6 edition of this column highlighted a chilling first-person account of how the founder and CEO of Newport Beach dental implant maker Glidewell Dental overcome a serious bout of the coronavirus a few months prior.
He’s going longer with his next work, a book called Constant Change. It is “a memoir of my adventures in business and life, from the start-up days to 5,000 employees,” Glidewell said via LinkedIn last week. It will be out in December and is published by Harriman House.
Christopher Trela can pick a winner.
Our esteemed executive dining columnist in March named Fable & Spirit’s David Shofner as the Business Journal’s 2020 Chef of the Year. Last Tuesday, Trela was dining at the Newport Beach restaurant when Fable owner Darren Coyle got the news of another award—it was one of only 25 restaurants in California, and just two in OC, given a prestigious Michelin “Discovery” award. The other local pick is Tustin’s Chaak Kitchen.
See page 14 for more on Fable & Spirit, and other area restaurant and food recommendations.
