Investor Buys Texas Instruments Site, Seeks Tenant
By DANIEL D. WILLIAMS
Newport Beach real estate investor and developer The Hamilton Co. has paid $7 million for Texas Instruments Inc.’s former Tustin facility and is in talks to lease the 85,514-square-foot building.
Hamilton is looking for a single tenant and is talking to several businesses about occupying the space, according to Bob Hartman, a Hamilton representative.
“We’re well aware of how soft the market is,” Hartman said “But we’re a real estate speculator. We bought it purely on spec hoping to find a tenant.”
Real estate sources said Hamilton got the property at a discount of around 40%.
“The property’s worth substantially more than what they paid,” said Bryon Ward, a senior vice president with the Newport Beach office of Grubb & Ellis Co.
Texas Instruments in December closed its operations at the 23-year-old building at 14511 Myford Road.
The move was part of a larger cost-cutting by the chipmaker, which is wrestling with an industry downturn.
The Dallas-based company had run a design center in Tustin. Roughly 250 OC workers moved to Texas in December.
Texas Instruments still has a small OC sales force, which relocated to 8,000 square feet of space in the nearby Irvine Technology Center.
According to Grubb & Ellis’ Ward, Hamilton typically buys buildings and looks to improve them. But few upgrades are needed on the Tustin property, he said.
A year ago, Texas Instruments did a multimillion dollar refurbishment of the site with the intention of consolidating its three OC facilities to the one location.
In September, the company decided to move its OC operations back to Texas and sell the building.
“Basically, it’s office and flex space,” Hamilton’s Hartman said. “The building already was highly improved. It was mostly an office building, with some lab space.”
Built in the 1980s, the building has been upgraded a few times. It first was occupied by Silicon Systems Inc., a unit of Japan’s TDK Corp. that Texas Instruments bought in 1996.
Initially, Texas Instruments made chips at the Tustin site’s wafer fabrication facility but eventually shifted to just administrative and sales operations.
At one point, Texas Instruments had about 230,000 square feet of space in three Tustin buildings, said Leland Bruce, a broker with the Irvine office of the Staubach Co.
Texas Instruments leased its two other former buildings, which were owned by private investors. Both buildings are vacant.
Leland Bruce, Mike Smith and Ryan Hopkins of Staubach represented Texas Instruments, while Ward of Grubb & Ellis represented Hamilton.
