Merrill Shuts Down Another OC Office
By RAJIV VYAS
Merrill Lynch & Co. has closed another Orange County office.
Fifteen brokers and five support workers from Merrill’s Anaheim office have moved to Brea and Santa Ana after the county’s largest brokerage closed its branch at the foot of Anaheim Hills.
“This was a pretty unusual situation,” Merrill spokesman Bill Halldin said. “We had three offices within close proximity.”
The offices were within 10 miles of each other. Merrill doesn’t want a lot of office space within a small area, he said.
Merrill had a 10-year lease for 6,000 square feet at 1065 Pacific Center Drive in Anaheim that expired in May. The company’s Brea office recently was renovated, Halldin said. Ten brokers and four support workers moved to the Brea office. Five brokers and one support person went to Santa Ana.
The move appears to be a cost-cutting effort and follows other Merrill office closures and consolidations. Like other brokerages, Merrill has been wrestling with the stock market downturn and a drop in demand for its services.
Anaheim marks the fourth OC office that Merrill has merged or shut since 2001.
In April, Merrill Lynch said it was pulling out of Newport Center,a hub for financial service companies. The Newport office had 25 workers including 18 financial advisers. They relocated to Merrill’s office at MacArthur Court in Newport Beach near the Irvine border.
Merrill didn’t take any extra space at MacArthur Court and housed incoming workers in the three floors it already had there. Nobody was laid off from the Newport Center office.
Last year, Merrill combined its Irvine office with one in Costa Mesa and closed another in San Juan Capistrano.
Merrill ranked No. 1 on the Business Journal’s February list of brokerages operating in OC. The New York-based company counts 450 local workers, down 9% from a year earlier.
