For Orange County’s office market, 2007 is likely to go down as the Year of the Flip.
The sale and resale of larger local office buildings increased more than fourfold in the first half of 2007, compared to the same period in 2006, according to industry trade publication Real Estate Alert.
The publication counted a total of $3.6 billion in major OC office sales for the first half of the year, compared to $877 million in the same period of 2006. A total of 43 properties in excess of $25 million traded hands in the first half of 2007, while only 12 offices topping $25 million sold in the first half of 2006.
A majority of this year’s deals resulted from Blackstone Group’s $39 billion acquisition of Equity Office Properties Trust, which counted a local office portfolio exceeding 2 million square feet. Those local offices were subsequently sold to Maguire Properties Inc., which in turn has sold off several of those properties in two separate deals.
Orange County ranked as the country’s seventh busiest market in terms of office sales in the first half of 2007, according to Real Estate Alert. Also, the brokerage that worked on the Blackstone deals, Eastdil Secured, was the top local brokerage.
New York was the busiest sales market so far this year, with $23 billion in office sales. Los Angeles ranked No. 6, with $3.8 billion of office sales, while San Diego was No. 11 with $2.1 billion in office deals.
Man of the Year
Last week’s Business Journal had a cover story on an office building being planned in Aliso Viejo by longtime local developer Parker Properties LLC. The company’s vice chairman, Russ Parker, was more interested in talking up a cause close to his heart ,leukemia research,than the Summit Office Campus development when we spoke.
Parker was recently named Man of the Year by the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s Orange County/Inland Empire chapter (he was also named runner-up for the White Plains, N.Y.-based association’s National Man of the Year).
He’s a cancer survivor. He was diagnosed with AML Leukemia in late 2004.
Parker’s been raising money,more than $160,000 in the past few months alone,for the association, which goes to blood cancer research and patient services. A lot of that fund raising was through the OC real estate community, Parker said. He said he’s working to raise the association’s profile in the local business community.
The new Summit office was actually item No. 3 in my talk with Parker. An avid surfer, he recently returned from a two-week surf trip to Indonesia. He’s got another trip to Fiji coming up soon, he said.
Sukut Taps IE
Santa Ana-based Sukut Construction Inc., California’s largest mass excavation and grading contractor, is opening an office in the Inland Empire.
The company’s Riverside office will focus on commercial, industrial, retail, housing and public works projects. Joe Philbin, who has managed $180 million in projects for Sukut, has been tapped as the unit’s president.
The company already has several Inland Empire projects in the works, including the Audie Murphy Ranch, a Menifee Valley housing development that includes 2,145 homes, two schools and some 340 acres of open space and parks. It’s also doing mass grading at Lake Hills Reserve, a 351-home hilltop development being led by Carlsbad-based Brehm Communities.
Sukut says it moves some 150 million cubic yards of earth a year.
Mariner Mile Sale Sought
Need a place in Newport Beach to dock your yacht?
Then buy a restaurant.
A 27,000-square-foot property along Newport Beach’s Mariner’s Mile is being put up for sale. The site’s asking price is $13 million, or about $481 per square foot.
The property, at 2607 West Coast Highway, includes a 5,000-square-foot free-standing restaurant building that’s being subleased to Joe’s Crab Shack.
It also has 400 linear feet of “owned” boat slips, according to Phil Voorhees, senior vice president for the Newport Beach office CB Richard Ellis Group Inc., whose retail group is listing the property for a group of private investors.
The restaurant lease runs for a little more than two years, while the lease on the boat slips ends in June 2009.
Correction
The cover of our July 16th interior design and construction special report featured tenant improvement work being done on Broadcom Corp.’s new campus. KPRS Construction should have been listed as the tenant improvement contractor for that project.
