Aliso Viejo-based office-campus operator TechSpace Inc. has a new chief executive.
The company, a landlord that offers flexible lease terms and ready-to-use technology for smaller businesses, is promoting Vic Memenas, the company’s chief operating officer.
He’s taking over the role from James “Watty” Watson, who co-founded TechSpace and is one of Orange County’s better-known real estate executives.
Watson will remain chairman of TechSpace’s board of directors.
Memenas has been with TechSpace for nearly a decade, a period of time that’s seen the one-time incubator for smaller technology companies evolve into a more traditional landlord role.
The company’s forte still is leasing space to smaller, entrepreneurial businesses, including 65 Enterprise, a building that is part of the Summit Office campus that runs along the San Joaquin Hills (73) Toll Road in Aliso Viejo.
Its 86,000 square feet of office space there is said to be more than 90% leased. The overall occupancy rate for the office market in Aliso Viejo is about 83%.
TechSpace also has three locations in New York City, all close to full, as well as 20,000 square feet in Westwood Village in Los Angeles.
TechSpace also is said to be eyeing a few additional office sites in OC for a potential expansion.
The company “is well positioned for growth,” Memenas said in a statement.
The growth of another Aliso Viejo-based real estate company is in large part responsible for the personnel move at TechSpace.
Watson said he wants to focus his full attention on CT Realty Investors Inc., a real estate investor where he also serves as chief executive and president.
Watson Brings Change
Watson joined the management team of CT Realty in late 2009, and has turned the company into one of the region’s most active buyers and sellers of industrial buildings over that time.
The company has been involved in close to 5 million square feet of industrial transactions in the Inland Empire over the past year.
CT Realty has developed a reputation of late of being a savvy deal-maker, based in large part on a 1.4-million-square-foot complex it bought in San Bernardino County late last year.
The company and its investment partners—Behringer Harvard in Addison, Tex-as; San Diego-based Westcore Properties; and PCCP LLC, a private equity firm in El Segundo—paid a reported $50 million for the two-building Cajon Distribution Center about a year ago. At the time, the property was empty.
Within six months, the property’s new owners got Hewlett-Packard Co. to lease the entire property.
The property now is being renamed the Inland Empire Distribution Center.
Terms of the seven-year Hewlett Packard lease weren’t disclosed, but it was believed to be among the priciest industrial leases signed in the country last year. The Palo Alto-based technology company is consolidating operations from four other locations to the facility.
Late last month, the fully leased San Bernardino building was sold to a unit of Atlanta-based Invesco Real Estate. Sources familiar with the deal say the property sold for close to $100 million.
The sale resulted “in a substantial gain for us,” Behringer Harvard officials said in a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commis-sion.
Among smaller sales, CT Realty last week announced it sold two office buildings at its 43-acre Citrus Park West business park in Riverside for $6.6 million. The buyer was the County of Riverside.
The two office buildings total 78,116 square feet and previously were part of a complex that formerly served as the national headquarters for RV-maker Fleetwood En-terprises Inc.
CT Realty purchased Citrus Park in 2008 from Fleetwood and converted the 417,811-square-foot, 12-building property to a multi-tenant business park.
Active Buyer
CT Realty remains an active buyer in the Inland Empire.
In August it bought the Dowling Orchard Business Park, a two-building warehouse in Beaumont near the intersection of the Moreno Valley (60) Freeway and Redlands (10) Freeway.
The buildings total 572,143 square feet; the sales price was said to be close to $20 million, or about $35 per square foot, according to brokerage data.
