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Land Sale Near Tustin Legacy Points to Next Hotel in Irvine

Add a hotel to the increasingly lengthy list of new types of product planned for land bordering the Tustin Legacy development site.

A 3.5-acre parcel along Barranca Parkway in Irvine—across the street from the southern edge of the former Marine Corps Air Station—was purchased late last month by a hotel investor who is exploring a new development.

The undeveloped parcel, at 1660 Barranca Parkway, could likely hold a hotel with between 150 and 175 rooms. There has been no disclosure of an affiliation with any hotel brand.

Tonho International Inc., a Huntington Beach-based company, paid about $7.4 million for the land, which is next to an industrial building used by Graphic Packaging Holding Co.

The deal works out to a price of about $2.1 million per acre. The property was sold by the Braille Institute of America Inc., according to Gary Allen, senior managing director for the Newport Beach office of Newmark Grubb Knight Frank.

The Braille Institute paid a little less than $5 million for the land in 2012, according to CoStar Group Inc. records.

The Los Angeles-based institute, which operates schools for the blind, had been planning to build a new location at the site for its Orange County operations but opted to remain in its present Anaheim location and sell the Irvine land, according to Allen, who represented the seller.

The buyer was represented by Steve Hayashi, a broker with the Arcadia office of Coldwell Banker Commercial. The buyer and its representatives did not respond to requests for comment on the purchase.

Surf City Sale

Tonho International last month sold the only other Orange County hotel property it was reported to own, a Best Western Regency Inn in Huntington Beach, for about $9.2 million, according to property records.

Plans for the company’s new project on Barranca haven’t been filed with the city of Irvine yet.

Once filed, it would likely take four months or so to get a hospitality project approved, according to Tim Strader Jr., president of Irvine-based Starpointe Ventures, an entitlement consultant that’s working with Tonho International on the project.

The project is one of three notable Irvine developments planned within a block of each other in the vicinity of the intersection of Red Hill Avenue and Barranca.

Sivax Inc., a Japanese company involved in the design and manufacturing of prototypes for automobiles and other products, plans to build a roughly 50,000-square-foot R&D and manufacturing facility on another parcel of land to just south of the proposed hotel development, at 1675 Deere Ave.

Sivax, which opened its North America office in Irvine last year, paid nearly $7.3 million for the roughly 3.5-acre site in January, according to brokerage data.

Glendale-based Public Storage Inc., one of the country’s largest owners of self-storage facilities, is in the process of converting an existing 183,000-square-foot office and industrial facility next to the Sivax site into a self-storage facility.

Tonho International’s plans also add to a busy slate of development planned for sites bordering the western and southern edges of Tustin Legacy, the 1,500-acre former military site that’s now seeing a burst of residential development.

The projects—which fall inside the boundaries of Irvine, Santa Ana and Tustin, all of which meet in the area—include creative-offices conversions, apartments, townhomes, industrial buildings and retail.

Tonho’s expected hotel development would be the first hospitality project proposed in that area, considered to be on the far edges of the Irvine Business Complex, the 2,800-acre, largely commercial area around John Wayne Airport.

Prior Plans

Hotels were previously planned as a major component of the Tustin Legacy development but were scrapped amid the last recession.

Subsequent development plans for the former base have to date not included hotel proposals.

Irvine has seen two hotels completed in the past year or so—a Hilton Garden Inn in the IBC and a Courtyard by Marriott in the Spectrum. A full-service Marriott is in the works in the Spectrum, and a boutique under the company’s AC Hotels brand is planned for the Park Place mixed-used development.

Those, along with a new hotel on Barranca Parkway, would give the city 20 hotels, according to Destination Irvine, a marketing and promotion group funded by the establishments.

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Mark Mueller
Mark Mueller
Mark is the Editor-in-Chief of the Orange County Business Journal, one of the premier regional business newspapers in the country. He’s the fifth person to hold the editor’s position in the paper’s long history. He oversees a staff of about 15 people. The OCBJ is considered a must-read for area business executives. The print edition of the paper is the primary source of local news for most of the Business Journal’s subscribers, which includes most of OC’s major corporate and community players. Mark’s been with the paper since 2005, and long served as the real estate reporter for the paper, breaking hundreds of commercial and residential real estate stories. He took on the editor’s position in 2018.
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