JPMorgan Chase & Co. has picked Costa Mesa for its new Orange County offices.
The financial services company just signed a five-year lease for space on the 10th floor at Center Tower. The building, at 650 Town Center Drive, is one of three high-rise office buildings owned by C.J. Segerstrom & Sons LLC, across the street from the family’s South Coast Plaza.
The Center Tower office is set to serve as JP Morgan’s local headquarters and be home to its private banking, treasury management and mid-corporate banking operations. JPMorgan had an office here years ago and has been in Century City since.
Segerstrom officials called the move a commentary on OC and reflective of the growth of financial firms catering to the wealthy in the Costa Mesa area.
The office towers around South Coast Plaza have been gaining and retaining big tenants as of late.
In June, the Costa Mesa office of Deloitte & Touche LLP, OC’s largest accounting firm, signed a 12-year lease deal to stay at Segerstrom’s 337,000-square-foot Park Tower. The building bears the accounting firm’s name. Deloitte’s renewal was for 125,000 square feet.
Last month, Rutan & Tucker LLP, the county’s largest law firm, signed a deal to stay at its Costa Mesa headquarters for at least another 15 years. The firm signed a lease for 112,000 square feet of office space at Maguire Properties Inc.’s 611 Anton Blvd. tower.
NNN Apartment Begins Buying
The latest offering from Santa Ana’s Triple Net Properties LLC is up and running.
NNN Apartment REIT Inc., an investment pool overseen by Triple Net to buy apartments, recently made its first acquisition, in San Antonio.
The company bought Walker Ranch Apartment Homes, a 325-unit complex, from Thompson Realty for about $31 million. The 17-building complex is about 98% full. The property has about 285,000 square feet of rentable space and takes up 20 acres.
The San Antonio deal “is indicative of the type and quality of properties we intend to acquire for NNN Apartment REIT,” said Louis Rogers, president of Triple Net and the apartment offshoot.
Triple Net is the driving force behind NNN Apartment, which has raised about $10 million to date from investors. The real estate investment trust is set to raise as much as $1 billion for apartment buys.
The San Antonio deal was financed by a credit agreement NNN Apartment struck with Wachovia Corp. about a month ago.
The revolving line of credit goes up to $75 million and could be upped to $200 million. NNN Apartment also has a $15 million mezzanine secured revolving line with Wachovia.
Triple Net Properties owns about 5,100 apartments along with nearly 31 million square feet of office space.
Maxim Moves Local Ops
Sunnyvale-based chipmaker Maxim Integrated Products Inc. is moving its Irvine operations.
The company just signed a lease for an 18,910-square-foot office building at 16812 Armstrong Ave., near the former Tustin marine base. The office is set to serve as the company’s regional design center.
Terms of the five-year lease weren’t disclosed.
Maxim plans to be moving to the two-story building in January. The company is relocating from 15,000 square feet of leased space elsewhere in Irvine.
Tom Taylor and Gary McArdell of Grubb & Ellis Co.’s Newport Beach office represented Maxim in the transaction. Larry Schuler in the Newport Beach office of CB Richard Ellis Group Inc. represented the landlord, Armstrong Building LLC of Irvine.
Blame the Tryptophan
The name and title of Frank Campbell, vice president of leasing for Equity Office Properties Trust, was missing from last week’s column item on the company, due to an editing error.
Irvine-based developer SunCal Cos., a masterplanned developer with projects locally and out of state, has landed its biggest-ever deal to date.
SunCal came up the winner late last month in its bid to buy 57,000 acres of historic New Mexico land.
It plans to build homes, shops and commercial space on the land, which runs along the banks of the Rio Grande.
The winning bid cost about $250 million. SunCal will acquire the land’s current owner, Albuquerque-based Westland Development Co. Westland is owned by heirs of the area’s original settlers.
They’ve had the land dating back to the 1692 Atrisco Land Grant from the king of Spain.
The acquisition was approved on Nov. 22 by Westland’s shareholders, the companies said. Two-thirds of Westland’s shareholders had to agree to the deal.
Westland said 72% of its 709,827 common stock shareholders and more than 97% of its 85,100 class B shareholders voted in favor of the acquisition.
The approval follows a contentious bidding process for the land. Critics of the sale said a failure to do proper due diligence for the land left money on the table. A lawsuit failed to stop the vote or merger.
Opponents still vow to fight the sale in court. Assuming those challenges fail, the deal is expected to close by year’s end. SunCal, which has opened an office in New Mexico, plans to start meeting with locals next year to discuss development plans.
