The University of California, Irvine is the latest buyer in a local property sale by MPG Office Trust Inc.
The Los Angeles-based landlord, which previously was Maguire Properties Inc., said in its most recent quarterly earnings report that it sold off excess land it owned in Orange, next to its 500 Orange Center office campus.
The property, a multi-acre strip of unused land next to the Santa Ana (I-5) Freeway, sold for about $5 million. MPG officials said the company received $4.7 million of proceeds in the deal.
The buyer wasn’t disclosed by MPG. Officials for UC Irvine this month confirmed it was the buyer, in one of the larger buys of commercial land here of late.
The land, which runs from North State College Boulevard to East Orangewood Avenue, could hold up to 900,000 square feet of office space, or about 960,000 square feet of parking space, according to regulatory filings.
UCI, which runs the neighboring UCI Medical Center, isn’t likely to build a structure. It plans to use the land for faculty and staff parking, according to Richard Orr, director of UCI’s campus asset management division.
The school likely will stick with surface parking at the site, rather than build a larger structure, he said.
The school has some 40 acres of land and buildings in the area but not enough parking, according to Orr.
“Parking is always the last thing you deal with,” Orr said.
This isn’t the first time that UCI has explored buying property once owned by MPG. The school looked at buying property at Irvine’s Quintana office campus near John Wayne Airport but didn’t make a deal, according to Orr.
Palo Alto-based real estate investor Menlo Equities LLC ended up buying Quintana, the largely empty Irvine office campus that once served as the local hub of Washington Mutual Inc.
Menlo Equities bought Quintana late last year out of receivership for a reported $69 million.
Besides the land sale, MPG Office’s 500 Orange Center is seeing some other changes.
The 333,000-square-foot office complex, which holds an office of Santa Ana-based Grubb & Ellis Co. and others, was placed into receivership earlier this year.
As of last year, MPG had about $110 million in loans tied to the property—one of four Orange County properties owned by MPG that are in financial distress. It defaulted on the loans in early 2010.
Mega Lease
An empty San Bernardino industrial building bought last year by Aliso Viejo’s CT Realty Inc. and others isn’t empty any more, after seeing one of the largest leases the area’s seen in the past few years.
CT Realty, a real estate investor that’s made a number of big industrial buys of late, said this month that it landed Hewlett-Packard Co. to take over all of its Cajon Distribution Center, a two-building, 1.4 million-square-foot property it bought about six months ago.
HP signed a seven-year lease at the 63-acre property, bringing it to capacity. It plans to move into the complex this summer.
CT Realty partnered with three other investors in buying the property last year: San Diego-based real estate investor Westcore Properties, New York-based private equity firm PCCP LLC and Addison, Texas-based real estate investor Behringer Harvard.
The property was said to have traded hands for $50 million.
The HP deal is one of the largest industrial leases to have ever occurred in the greater Los Angeles market, according to the landlords, who were represented by Darla Longo, Jim Koenig, Dave Consani and Dan de la Paz of CB Richard Ellis Group Inc.
HP was represented by Alex Somerville, Kent Gilbert, Raul Campos and Grant Ross, also of CB Richard Ellis.
Hotel Going Up
Irvine’s R.D. Olson Development has broken ground on a 130-room hotel in San Juan Capistrano.
The company, one of the area’s top hotel developers, is building a $22 million Residence Inn by Marriott at 33711 Camino Capistrano, just off the San Diego (I-5) Freeway.
It’s the fifth hotel R.D. Olson has developed in OC. Marriott International is set to manage the hotel, while R.D. Olson will retain ownership through a related entity, Camino Capistrano SPE.
The hotel will be about 91,500 square feet and include 1,500 square feet of meeting space and a 1,000-square-foot fitness center. The hotel’s expected to be completed by early 2012.
