Austin has been a hotspot for Orange County-based commercial real estate investors recently as they’ve snapped up a number of offices, apartments and other properties in and around the Texas capital over the past year, attracted by the area’s strong base of technology, government and healthcare employers.
Auction.com, the Irvine-based online real estate auction company, also has growth plans in Austin, but from an operational standpoint. The company said it is opening an office in the city and plans to hire about 40 people there.
It said the Austin office will be its first location dedicated to client management and business development.
Officials said the office should benefit from its access to the wealth of local talent in Austin, which is considered to be the technology center of Texas.
The announcement comes a couple of weeks after executives at Santa Ana-based mortgage lender Stearns Lending Inc. told the Business Journal the company would open a call center in Texas, in part because of what’s considered to be a more favorable business climate in the Lone Star State, plus aggressive pitches by Gov. Rick Perry.
Auction.com cited skilled employees, rather than politics, as the reason behind its new office.
Austin “offers an excellent talent pool of professionals from leading technology companies who have the experience to help us better serve our customers and enhance the current teams in our Irvine headquarters,” Auction.com Executive Vice President John Hood said in a statement.
“Building and scaling a high-quality sales and business development team is a key driver to our continued success as a business,” Hood said.
Auction.com employs about 1,000 people including several hundred in Irvine.
On the auction front, the company has a number of notable local properties up for sale.
One of the pricier homes it currently has on the market is a 6,000-square-foot estate in Coto de Caza’s Los Ranchos Estates. The five-bedroom home, located on 5.3 acres, has a minimum starting bid of $1.5 million; it was listed for sale by other brokers at nearly $3.9 million earlier this year.
Among commercial properties, Auction.com is working with the local office of Cushman & Wakefield Inc. to market Savi Tech Center, a four-building, 372,000-square-foot office campus in Yorba Linda.
The complex, a few blocks off the Riverside (91) Freeway, is about 87% leased to tenants that include Carefusion, Nobel Biocare USA and Furniture Homestores. The buildings bring in more than $5 million in rents annually.
The completion of the private auction of the Savi Tech campus is expected this month; the final few bidders were recently selected, according to Cushman brokers. The website didn’t disclose a minimum bid for the property. The campus last traded hands in a 2008 portfolio sale.
Storage Surge
The management team behind Strategic Storage Trust Inc., a Ladera Ranch-based investor in self-storage facilities, has a second real estate investment trust in the works.
The company this month filed plans with the Securities and Exchange Commission to raise as much as $1.1 billion for Strategic Storage Trust II Inc., a nontraded REIT that, like its predecessor, intends to invest in self-storage facilities and related properties.
A time frame for the new REIT’s launch hasn’t been disclosed. Strategic Storage’s first nontraded REIT will be closed to new investments this month, according to the company’s website.
The initial investment fund, launched in 2008, raised $289 million from investors over a nearly three-year period. The company used the money from the offering, along with debt, to buy about $360 million worth of properties in the U.S. and Canada.
The properties are branded under the SmartStop Self Storage name.
Recent acquisitions include a $5.2 million purchase of a New Jersey self-storage facility and a $6.6 million buy in South Carolina. The company also just opened a 100,100-square-foot, 800-unit facility it built in the Toronto area.
Strategic Storage Trust will use about 88.5% of the proceeds from the new offering for acquisitions, with the rest going to pay sales commissions, management fees and other expenses.
Strategic Storage is headed by Chief Executive H. Michael Schwartz, who previously served as managing director of private structured offerings for Santa Ana-based Triple Net Properties LLC.
