The insurance industry has been one of the few bright spots for Orange County’s battered office market this year.
Insurers “make up a stable and important component” of the local office market, said Royce Sharf, executive vice president for the Irvine office of tenant brokerage Studley Inc.
Unlike other parts of the financial services world, particularly the mortgage industry, “insurance appears to holding up,” Sharf said.
The only office tower in the county to open its doors fully occupied this year did so because of an insurance tenant. Newport Beach-based Pacific Life Insurance Co. took off the wraps of its nine-story building in Aliso Viejo in April.
Pacific Life’s 248,806-square-foot building holds about 1,000 employees. It serves as the headquarters for the company’s life insurance division, whose employees were consolidated here from offices in Foothill Ranch and Pacific Life’ main headquarters in Newport Center.
Pacific Life’s building was designed specifically for the company.
Other owners of OC office towers are hoping to find an equally large tenant to fill some of their empty buildings.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. is looking at OC as a possible site to hold some 600 employees, who would work to sell off assets from failed banks. The government agency is looking for about 200,000 square feet of space and is expected to announce a location for its offices in a few weeks.
Office buildings in the Irvine Spectrum and around John Wayne Airport are said to be the most likely sites for the FDIC.
Offices in Los Angeles are in the running. Irvine is also being considered by the FDIC because of its concentration of potential workers with backgrounds in real estate and finance and proximity to an airport.
OC, and its slumping office market, could use the extra jobs.
In September, OC lost 29,600 jobs from a year earlier, according to California’s Employment Development Department. Of those losses, 10,700 were in financial services,primarily the mortgage industry.
Along with a heavy dose of office construction during the past two years, OC’s job losses helped drive vacancy rates in the county’s 107 million square feet of office buildings to nearly 16% at the end of September, which is up some 50% from a year earlier.
Empty Space
Locally, the insurance industry isn’t without its share of job losses and space give-backs.
The auto lending division of under-fire American International Group Inc., which offers property and casualty policies and specialty insurance to businesses, institutions and other customers, is letting go of more than 100 workers in its Brea offices.
Among other reported job losses, this summer more than 450 layoffs in Irvine were reported by an insurance division of the California State Automobile Association, state employment records show.
Seattle-based Safeco Corp., a one-time Fortune 500 insurance and financial company, disclosed in May it had put about 75,000 square feet of Aliso Viejo area space it was leasing back on the market, one of the larger space give-backs in South Orange County this year.
Property and casualty insurance operations for the company’s Southwest division had been run out of the building. Safeco signed a 15-year lease for 120,000 square feet of space at the building in 2001, prior to the office getting built. About 91,000 square feet of the office’s space still is on the market, according to CoStar Group Inc. The plan to sublease the space was made before SafeCo completed its acquisition by Liberty Mutual Holding Co. The deal created the fifth-largest U.S. property and casualty insurer.
The upscale space built for Pacific Life, and which the FDIC is considering, is a bit of an anomaly for insurance-related businesses, brokers note.
Insurance office space tends to favor large floor plates, to accommodate big back-room operations. Low-rise offices, such as in the Irvine Spectrum, also are sought out by tenants.
Sacramento-based Panattoni Development Co. is targeting the insurance sector, among other industries, for office space in Anaheim it bought from Boeing Corp. a year ago and is redeveloping.
