RESIDENTIAL
It’s a busy, if not a little chaotic, time to be a consultant to developers and homebuilders, says Jeff Meyers, founder of Corona del Mar’s Meyers Builder Advisors.
More speculative developers, private equity firms and hedge funds are looking for bargain prices on land, while a number cash-strapped builders are trying to figure out the value of their holdings, and whether they should sell.
“A lot of public (homebuilding) companies are going to re-trade land to get it off the balance sheet,” Meyers said.
Last month’s $525 million venture between Miami-based Lennar Corp. and the real estate arm of Morgan Stanley, in particular, is helping other builders “find the bottom quicker,” he said.
“It gave permission to other (builders) to try the same thing,” Meyers said.
Lennar sold 11,000 lots, spread among eight states, at about 40% of its estimated book value of $1.3 billion in that deal.
The shaky residential market is proving to be a time of growth for Meyers, who sold his old consulting group, the Meyers Group, to Hanley Wood Market Intelligence in 2004.
This month, Hanley Wood opted to largely get out of the consulting business to focus more on research. Meyers Building Advisors grabbed 10 employees from Hanley Wood, doubling the size of the firm that was formed in 2006.
Meyers Building Advisors now has offices in California, Arizona and Chicago.
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15172 Goldenwest Circle: Universal Building Products renewed lease for headquarters |
Locally, Meyers still is seeing mixed-use development moving forward. But he predicts a slow go of it for urban-type housing developers in the next few years until the market is sorted out.
“It’s the future of the county, but (prospective buyers) don’t feel as confident that they’re buying at the bottom,” he said.
One such urban project in limbo is Parc Anaheim, a proposed development near the Disneyland Resort that’s slated to include 449 homes, including two 10-story towers. The project, on the site of a motor home park, is being headed up by Santa Ana-based Urban+West and Irvine’s St. Clair Meyers Partners LLC, a development firm Meyers and Steve St. Clair started up in 2005.
COMMERCIAL
Universal Building Products Inc., a maker of concrete forms and accessories, has renewed its lease for its sales and manufacturing headquarters, in Westminster.
The privately owned company, which also operates under the Don De Cristo Concrete Accessories Inc. name, signed a five-year extension for its 102,000-square-foot facility at 15172 Goldenwest Circle.
Terms of the transaction weren’t disclosed. The tenant had been paying about 59 cents per square foot for rent. The new lease was believed to be at least 5 cents per square foot higher.
Universal Building Products has been in this location for the past 10 years. It uses the facility for sales and manufacturing of its products for Southern California’s construction industry. The company employs 80 people at the facility.
Shane Wilder, corporate managing director of Studley Inc.’s Irvine office, represented Universal Building Products in the transaction. The building’s owner, Irvine-based Cornerstone Core Properties REIT Inc., was represented by its Pat Murphy.
The Westminster building was acquired about a year ago by Cornerstone, an offshoot of Cornerstone Real Estate Funds, for $11.2 million. It’s the company’s only Orange County acquisition to date.
The real estate investment trust’s blind pool offering, which started about two years ago, is hoping to raise as much as $355 million for acquisitions. As of November, it had raised about $70 million.
Corona del Mar Sale
A small retail center in Corona Del Mar just traded hands at a hefty price after a bidding war.
A locally based family trust just paid $3.2 million for a 3,800-square-foot, two-story mixed-use building at 3100 E. Pacific Coast Highway.
The building traded hands at $842 per square foot, with a 3% capitalization rate and negative cash flow. The seller was a private investor.
The building’s location was largely behind the high sales price, according to Paul Bitonti of Marcus & Millichap Real Estate Investment Service’s Newport Beach office, who represented both parties in the transaction.
The center is across the street from an Albertsons and counts two tenants, the McKibben Studios art gallery and a Curves gym.
