Spectrum Group International Inc., an Irvine-based company that sells and trades gold and other precious metals, quietly completed one of the larger user-owner office deals of the past quarter, according to regulatory filings.
Spectrum recently paid $7.3 million for a 54,000-square-foot Irvine office building near the Costa Mesa (55) Freeway.
The building is at 1063 McGaw Ave., across the freeway from the campus of Santa Ana-based title insurer First American Financial Corp. The building had been used by Schwarzkopf & Henkel, an arm of consumer products company Henkel AG, which recently opened a new office on Jamboree Road, where it is consolidating local operations.
The McGaw property will serve as the new headquarters of Spectrum Group and its affiliated companies, according to a recent company filing made with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. A time frame for the move wasn’t disclosed.
The publically traded company buys gold from governments—including the U.S., Canada, Australia, South Africa, China and Austria—and sells it to banks, coin dealers, jewelers, collectors, investors, refiners and manufacturers.
The company had been based out of a 20,000-square-foot office building about a mile away from the McGaw property. It also had been leasing space in two warehouses locally for its operations.
The sale works out to a price of $135 per square foot. The seller was an entity called LW McGaw LP, which is believed to be a unit of Newport Beach-based general contractor Wittenberg-Livingston Inc.
The deal included the assumption of a $6.6 million loan due by mid-2015, with monthly payments of about $41,000.
The buy had been in the works since late last year and closed last quarter, according to regulatory filings. It was the fourth-largest office sale in the second quarter—and the largest involving an owner-user, according to brokerage data from Colliers Internation-al’s Irvine office.
The sale was arranged through Lee & Associates-Newport Beach Inc., with John Collins acting as the seller’s broker, and Art Holland representing the buyer.
Spectrum Group counts a market value of about $91 million; its shares once traded on Nasdaq but now are on the low-profile Pink Sheets.
The company has about 140 employees, with about 100 of them in Orange County.
Marblehead Pricing
Any buyer interested in San Clemente’s Marblehead Coastal development should expect to pay more than $84.4 million, if the latest batch of bankruptcy court filings related to the stalled project gets court approval.
Irvine-based SunCal Cos. filed an amended plan of reorganization for Marblehead and more than 15 other projects it owns with Santa Ana’s federal bankruptcy court late last month.
The master developer has been locked in a court battle here and in New York with bankrupt financier Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., its one-time partner, over Marblehead and many other Southern California projects that have been in limbo since the housing market soured.
In the latest reorganization plan, SunCal put forth plans for a sales process for Marblehead and other assets. It suggests offering the 247-acre Marblehead project, which overlooks the ocean in San Clemente, at an initial sales price of at least $84.4 million in a court-overseen auction.
That would make it the priciest Lehman-backed SunCal asset in California currently in bankruptcy, according to SunCal’s valuation.
Lehman and its affiliates reportedly loaned SunCal more than $300 million to buy the land in 2005. More than 300 high-end homes and shops are planned at the site.
An April appraisal done on the property by SunCal placed a $93.8 million value on the land, while Lehman’s last valuation of the land, made more than two years ago, was about $187 million.
A quick approval for SunCal’s latest proposal doesn’t seem likely, based on the legal wrangling seen so far in the case.
But if the deal makes its way through the court, it could turn out to be a winner for the developer. SunCal has already used court-overseen sales to buy back two properties in Riverside County, and another one in Bakersfield, at steep discounts to their prior value.
Storage Buys
Ladera Ranch’s Strategic Storage Trust Inc. said it has paid $12.2 million for self-storage properties in San Francisco, Las Vegas and Hampton, Va.
The three deals total about 2,100 units and nearly 220,000 square feet. They bring Strategic Storage’s total portfolio to about 50,000 units in the U.S. and Canada.
The facilities are being rebranded under the company’s SmartStop Self Storage trade name.
The company’s San Francisco portfolio now is about 2,000 units, while the Las Vegas portfolio totals close to 4,700. There are 2,450 units in Virginia.
Strategic Storage, a non-traded real estate investment trust, has raised more than $250 million from investors since 2008.
