RESIDENTIAL
In March, I wrote a cover story on Irvine’s National Home Auction Corp., an upstart foreclosed home auction company that sold more than $40 million worth of homes in its first auction in February.
Don’t expect to see any more auctions for the company. National Home has closed its doors and its Web site is gone. The company’s last auction was this summer.
Ongoing, costly litigation with the country’s largest home auction company, Irvine-based Real Estate Disposition Co., or REDC, is behind the closure, said Ryan Knott, National Home’s chief executive.
REDC claimed that National Home copied Real Estate Disposition’s business model and auction process, operated a virtually identical Web site and ran commercials similar to its own.
Irvine-based Impac Mortgage Holdings Inc. is Real Estate Disposition’s primary source of foreclosed homes that are sold at auctions. It also acts as a consultant to the auctioneer.
Initial court decisions sided with National Home, but the case is still active in Federal Court. Among other rulings, the court personally dismissed two National Home investors,Robert Campbell, president of Newport Beach-based developer CT Realty Corp. (see related story, page 3), and James “Watty” Watson, chief executive of Aliso Viejo-based TechSpace Inc.,as defendants in the lawsuit.
Some of National Home’s investors are now looking to fund a different business, REO Locators LLC, which is based in Irvine.
|
|
3190 E. Miraloma Ave.: vacated by TDK Electronics Corp and put up for sale |
REO Locators will work directly with sellers of foreclosed homes to sell properties, combining the normal agent-focused methods of listing and selling homes with the more advanced marketing and advertising methods used by the auction company.
The goal is to get bank-owned properties sold in three to four months, without having to resort to selling them at auction, which can take closer to nine months to get a home off a bank’s books, said Knott, who has come aboard as chief executive of the new company.
COMMERCIAL
A number of big buildings on Anaheim’s East Miraloma Avenue, in the Canyon Business Center, have been seeing long-time tenants depart this summer. More than 800,000 square feet of office and industrial space there has been vacated in the past few months.
One of the more recent changes: a 163,139-square-foot industrial building at 3190 E. Miraloma Ave. previously used by TDK Electronics Corp. was vacated and put up for sale.
The building, owned by Minnesota-based Imation Corp., is on the market for sale, or possible lease. Imation acquired TDK last year, and opted to close the distribution center and move those operations out of the state.
The company took a $2.5 million charge in the second quarter for severance-related costs associated with the closing of the Anaheim distribution center, Imation said in its most recent quarterly report. Layoffs numbers were not disclosed.
The warehouse is listed for sale at $20.7 million, or about $127 per square foot, according to CoStar Group Inc. Brokers from the Anaheim and Newport Beach offices of CB Richard Ellis Group Inc. are marketing the building.
The warehouse was built in 1976, and any new owner will likely need to put a good amount of work into the site, according to brokers.
The TDK site, which totals about 11 acres, sits next to two recently vacated offices on East Miraloma Avenue that were previously used by Boeing Corp. Those buildings are slated for a major redevelopment.
Sacramento’s Panattoni Development Co. bought the buildings,a six-story, 192,000-square-foot office tower and a two-story, 198,000-square-foot office building,late last year.
They’re the first two buildings being redeveloped on the former Boeing land, which Panattoni has renamed the Anaheim Concourse.
There is another newly empty industrial building down on Miraloma: the recently built, 300,000-square-foot warehouse previously used by Pacific Sunwear of California Inc. Panattoni bought that building and is incorporating it into the Anaheim Concourse.
Red Mountain Seeks Financing
Santa Ana-based retail developer Red Mountain Retail Group Inc. is moving ahead with plans for a 500,000-square-foot mall in South Gate, about 15 miles south of Los Angeles.
Red Mountain and partner Allied Retail Partners LLC of Los Angeles said they are working to get funding for the 28.5-acre project, which will be targeting the area’s Hispanic community. They’ve tapped Newport Beach-based Buchanan Street Partners to arrange financing for the $218 million development.
The company hopes to break ground by year’s end, according to Michael Mugel, Red Mountain’s chief executive.
