A midsize apartment complex steps from the ocean in Newport Beach has been acquired by a new owner with plans for a for-sale residential project at the site.
The Irvine office of Scottsdale, Ariz.-based homebuilder Taylor Morrison Home Corp. recently completed the purchase of Las Brisas, a 1970s-era apartment complex on River Avenue west of Pacific Coast Highway.
Terms of the sale weren’t immediately disclosed for the 54-unit complex.
LB9 Owner LLC, the Newport Beach-based seller of the property, paid a reported $25 million—or roughly $463,000 per unit—for the complex in 2013.
The seller has ties to Newport Beach-based developer Brooks Street, which has plenty of familiarity with the area.
Brooks Street, along with Aera Energy and Cherokee Investment Partners, is part of the Newport Banning Ranch consortium looking to turn land in the nearby Banning Ranch area of the city into a development of 1,375 homes and some commercial uses.
A smaller development is expected at the Las Brisas site, where the existing apartment complex runs about 49,000 square feet and is on 1.5 acres of land.
A development plan that’s been on the books since 2008 calls for the existing complex to be razed to make way for Echo Beach, a project that would hold 12 single-family homes and six duplex units.
A revised proposal for the site, previously known as Seashore Village, was brought up with the city last year. That plan would eliminate the duplex units and instead have 24 single-family homes built on the land.
The new project would total about 51,000 square feet.
A time frame for the new development hasn’t been disclosed by Taylor Morrison, whose other big coastal housing project in Orange County is Marblehead in San Clemente.
Taylor Morrison last April formed a venture with its two largest shareholders, Oaktree Capital Management LP and TPG, to buy the 195.5-acre Marblehead site for an estimated $205 million.
Silicon Addition
Irvine Company ended 2014 with another office portfolio purchase in Silicon Valley.
The Newport Beach-based investor and developer, the largest office owner in California, recently snapped up a five-building collection of offices in the Peery Park business district in Sunnyvale.
The buildings, which total about 113,000 square feet, sold for nearly $40 million, according to the Silicon Valley Business Journal, which first reported the acquisition.
The buildings were sold by a unit of Los Angeles-based Arden Realty Inc., which is owned by a unit of General Electric Capital Corp.
Irvine Co. already has a few dozen office and industrial properties in the vicinity of its latest collection of offices in Sunnyvale.
As of 2012, the company was said to already be the largest property owner in Peery Park, a 407-acre area that’s being eyed by the city for potential redevelopment.
Arden could be in the news for sales again in 2015, according to area sources.
Brokers familiar with Arden’s operations say the company could be looking to sell all or parts of its office portfolio in Southern California, either individually or in a larger portfolio sale.
Arden owned about 1.7 million square feet of office space in Orange County as of 2014, according to Business Journal data.
Creative Growth
The city of Tustin wants a portion of its Tustin Legacy development to be a lot more creative.
The city last year signed off on a plan to turn a 43-acre portion of its Tustin Legacy development into Orange County’s largest creative-office campus.
The initial plans for the project—called Cornerstone at Tustin Legacy—were to build 508,000 square feet of low- and midrise office space on the land, near the intersection of Barranca Parkway and a planned extension of Armstrong Avenue.
Brokers with the Newport Beach office of CBRE Group Inc. who are marketing the land for sale to potential owner-users and developers say that cumulative figure has been increased to 860,000 square feet.
More traditional offices were initially envisioned for portions of the former Marine helicopter base in prior iterations of the massive development, but those never moved ahead in the last recession and subsequent downturn in the local office market.
