Growing consumer lender CashCall Inc. has signed one of the larger office leases here in the past year.
The Fountain Valley-based company, which offers loans quickly over the phone or online, just signed a deal to lease 127,750 square feet of space at Arena Corporate Center, next to Honda Center in Anaheim.
CashCall is taking one of three buildings at the 382,000-square-foot complex, developed by Dallas-based Trammell Crow Co. in 2003.
The company is subleasing the space from Orange-based ACC Capital Holdings Corp.’s Ameriquest Mortgage Co.
The subprime mortgage lender, rumored to be up for sale, has been looking to sublease as much as 600,000 square feet of space in Irvine, Anaheim and Orange since last summer. The CashCall deal is the largest chunk of Ameriquest space subleased so far.
The Anaheim move more than doubles CashCall’s local space and is the second big office lease it has struck here in the past 18 months.
CashCall signed a seven-year deal for its current headquarters, which totals about 100,000 square feet, in mid-2005. It added another 30,000 square feet of space in Las Vegas late last year.
Keeping HQ
The company plans to move its loan servicing group from Fountain Valley to the two-story building in Anaheim. It plans to keep all the space at its headquarters on Brookhurst Street.
CashCall is led by owner John Paul Reddam, who created and sold Costa Mesa-based Ditech.com to GMAC Mortgage Corp. back in the 1990s.
The company, best known for its ads with former “Diff’rent Strokes” star Gary Coleman, makes loans that aren’t secured by a home, car or anything else. Its Web site says money can be wired in one business day to a borrower’s bank account.
Loans go as high as $20,000 and can be pricey. For loans in California, the annual percentage rate can run from 24.2% for a $20,000 loan to a whopping 99.3% for a $2,600 loan.
CashCall has started moving into the furnished Anaheim building, according to Jay Carnahan, founder of Costa Mesa’s Orion Property Partners Inc., which represented CashCall in the lease along with colleagues Adam Boskovich and Robert Thagard.
John Gillespie of Newport Commercial Realty Advisors represented ACC Capital.
The deal should give the company room to grow in Anaheim and Fountain Valley, according to Carnahan. The Anaheim building is designed to house more than 900 workers.
Terms for the sublease weren’t disclosed. Monthly asking lease rates were $2.10 per square foot at the time Ameriquest put the space on the market last year. Ameriquest’s lease runs through mid-2009.
It’s the fourth big sublease deal for former Ameriquest space.
LA Fitness Inc., the Irvine-based health club chain, said in December it was moving to 60,013 square feet of the subprime lender’s space at Equity Office Properties Trust’s 2600 Michelson tower in Irvine.
In September, Irvine cosmetics company Arbonne International LLC signed on to sublease 90,000 square feet of office space being vacated at The Irvine Company’s 3 Park Plaza tower at Jamboree Center in Irvine.
In June, Santa Ana-based mortgage lender Stearns Lending Inc. said it was finalizing a deal to lease 23,000 square feet of Jamboree Center office space being vacated by Ameriquest.
The deals are “a sign of the times,” Carnahan said.
“With the absence of large blocks of space that are available immediately, and given the prices of the new product being built, it’s a good value play,” he said of the sublease space.
