Impac Mortgage Holdings Inc., in the midst of downsizing from the struggling mortgage market, has put its new headquarters in Irvine up for sublease.
The real estate investment trust, which shut down most of its mortgage lending operations last month, is marketing all seven floors of its namesake building at Impac Center for sublease.
Impac moved into its 200,000-square-foot headquarters at 19500 Jamboree Road last year, consolidating operations from other Orange County sites.
The company pays close to $7 million in rent at Impac Center annually. Its lease runs through 2016.
Impac’s building, the largest at the Impac Center complex, is designed to hold close to 800 workers. Following several rounds of layoffs by Impac,including some 500 workers in the past two months,the building is believed to be about a third full.
The company leased the space in early 2005 in one of the larger OC lease deals of that year. The deal was signed when the company’s market value was close to $1.4 billion, compared to about $120 million now.
It’s the latest example of a big giveback of space in the area by mortgage companies, which is affecting new office towers in Irvine as well as older buildings across the county. Roughly 5% of the county’s 98 million square feet of office space had been leased to mortgage companies.
An estimated 2 million square feet of that space has since been put back on the market in the past year and a half by some of the industry’s biggest names, including bankrupt New Century Financial Corp. of Irvine and Orange-based ACC Capital Holdings Corp., parent of subprime lender Ameriquest Mortgage Co.
Given slow office leasing as of late,especially for large blocks of office space,it’s likely Impac will give back space on a floor-by-floor basis, rather than all at once.
The building includes two floors that hold Impac’s data center. Those floors would likely be last to be subleased, brokers said.
Impac also holds leases for space in three other office buildings in Newport Beach, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The other leases are for 105,000 square feet of space and expire between May and September. Impac is subleasing some of that space, the filings said.
Impac’s decision to retrench comes as Impac Center itself is expanding.
A steel frame is up for a third office building at the complex near Irvine’s border with Newport Beach. John Laing Homes plans to move its headquarters about a mile from Newport Beach to the new, $24 million office building, which is being built by the Irvine office of San Diego-based Roel Construction Co.
The local operations of Google Inc. are based in the second office building at Impac Center, which also is home to upscale restaurant Kimera.
A fourth building at the complex, being developed by Scholle Co., is in the planning stages.
For more on this story, see the Oct. 1 edition of the Business Journal.
