Newport Beach developer Olen Properties Corp. has started on a 260-apartment complex in Brea, the largest to go up in the North County city in the past decade.
Olen, which owns more than 11,000 apartments in Arizona, Nevada and Florida, is building the complex at its Olen Pointe Brea office campus along the Orange (57) Freeway.
Olen Pointe Brea has close to 700,000 square feet of office space and four restaurants. It’s one of the largest office complexes in Brea, which has about 4.1 million square feet of office space.
The four-story apartment buildings are being built on top of a parking structure in the middle of the office campus.
Olen originally envisioned another office building on the site and opted instead for apartments.
Demand for apartments also is slowing, but not as dramatically as demand for homes or offices.
In the second quarter, 5.8% of the county’s apartments were empty, up from 4.4% a year earlier and the highest vacancy rate since 2002, according to Dallas-based Axiometrics Inc.
For more on this story, read the Aug. 18 edition of the Business Journal.
