By JOSEPH ASCENZI
Irvine’s Sares-Regis Group has paid $47 million for 100 acres near Ontario International Airport, one of the last big parcels in the western Inland Empire.
Sares-Regis plans to build warehouses and buildings for light manufacturing.
“We’ve developed a lot of property in that area, and we’re going to do more of the same,” said Peter Rooney, president of acquisitions for Sares-Regis’ commercial investment division.
Sares-Regis develops industrial and office parks, apartments and condominiums. The company, which counts yearly revenue of about $430 million, has built warehouses and smaller industrial buildings in nearby Rialto and Fontana.
Now land is growing scarce in parts of the Inland Empire, pushing big developments further into the desert.
The land, southeast of the Ontario airport near Interstates 10 and 15, has its issues.
The site is home to a federally protected bug, the Delhi Sands Flower-Loving Fly. It’s also home to burrowing owls, which are protected by the state.
The environmental issues could have scared off other bidders on the land, said Chuck Belden of the Ontario office of real estate brokerage Cushman & Wakefield Inc.
Sares-Regis was the only formal bidder during a March 30 auction by San Bernardino County.
Two other developers, Ridge Property Trust of Chicago and General Equity Inc. of Fremont, attended but didn’t make offers.
Belden and others said they were surprised the land didn’t get more bites, or even go for more than $475,000 an acre.
“I wouldn’t say they got a steal, but they got a tremendous deal,” Belden said.
General Equity’s president, Phyllis Shih, said the protected species on the land swayed her decision not to bid.
“It’s a very good piece of property with a lot of potential,” she said. “But there are environmental issues, and I needed some answers to that before I could submit a bid.”
Sares-Regis didn’t mind the lack of competition at the auction.
“We expected more people to show up, and we don’t know why more people weren’t there,” said Larry Lukanish, Sares-Regis’s vice president of commercial investment. “The environmental issues might have frightened some people off, or they might not have liked the idea of an auction.”
The company now has to get the land zoned for development. Ontario is handling approvals for the county land just next to the city.
The county bought the property in 1991 to settle a legal dispute. The original owner was concerned about methane leaks from neighboring Milliken Landfill, which stopped accepting trash in 1999 and closed last year.
The owner sued and the county ended up buying the land as a buffer to the landfill.
The auction marked the end of an era.
There’s no other big piece of industrial land in the western Inland Empire close to the airport and freeways.
Ascenzi is a staff writer with The Business Press in Ontario.
