Panattoni’s Irvine Arm Building Riverside Facility
Sares Regis Opens Latest Building; Aslan Buying, Upgrading Apartments
REAL ESTATE
by Daniel D. Williams
COMMERCIAL
The Irvine office of Sacramento-based Panattoni Development Co. is getting in on the Inland Empire’s big-box development boom.
The company plans to build a $14 million, 400,580-square-foot distribution center in Riverside for Canada’s Magnussen Presidential Furniture. The build-to-suit project is in the Sycamore Canyon Business Park. Magnussen, which sells furniture through J.C. Penney Co., Levitz Furniture Corp. and others, is expected to employ about 100 people in Riverside.
“We were looking for a central location with established transportation networks to receive furniture from our manufacturing facilities in Mexico and the Far East,” said Richard Magnussen, the company’s chairman.
“We needed to be able to ship our product anywhere in North America within four to seven days.”
Bill Heim and Michael Chavez of Lee & Associates, Ontario office represented Magnussen. Panattoni Development was represented by Darla Longo and Art Day of CB Richard Ellis Services Inc. in Ontario and Stephen Batcheller in Anaheim.
Construction of the distribution center is set to be completed by summer.
Panattoni is completing the second phase of its South Haven Business Park in Ontario. Irvine-based Kawasaki Motors Corp. U.S.A. has a 175,000-square-foot facility in the million-square-foot industrial complex.
Business Center Pep Talk
Former UCLA basketball coach John Wooden recently was on hand for the opening of Irvine-based Sares Regis Group’s newest building at its Orange County Business Center, a six-building, 476,000-square-foot office park in Santa Ana.
Wooden spoke to the brokers at the unveiling of 1231 E. Dyer Road, a two-story, 112,000-square-foot office building. The space is vacant. Building 6, a 55,000-square-foot facility expected to open during the third quarter, will complete the business park’s development.
Tenants at the park include Cigna Corp., GeoLogistics Corp., Morgan Stanley & Co., Fidelity National Financial Inc. and National Water & Power Inc.
Barry Gail and David Dowd of Cushman & Wakefield Inc. are marketing the project.
RESIDENTIAL
Real estate prices certainly are not what they used to be. As such, Irvine-based investment company Aslan Realty Group sees it as a good time to add to its Southern California apartment holdings.
Most recently, Aslan paid $35.3 million to AvalonBay, an Alexandria, Va.-based real estate investment trust, for Arbor Heights Apartments, a 350-unit apartment complex just over the county line in Hacienda Heights.
According to Tom Rakow, a general partner with Aslan, the company looks for what it considers undervalued or under-managed properties.
The company sees renovation as the direction to take in the current market, Rakow said. In the past few years, Aslan has bought and upgraded more than 3,000 apartments, according to Rakow.
Aslan cites “challenging regulatory processes and unpredictable completion dates” as reasons for favoring rehabilitation vs. new construction. Ideally, Aslan identifies properties with 100 to 300 units at $7.5 million to $30 million and flips a property within five years.
For the Arbor Heights Apartments, Aslan used J.P. Morgan & Co. for debt financing and Buchanan Urban Investors for equity financing. Buchanan Urban Investors is a joint venture between Newport Beach-based Buchanan Street Partners and the California Public Employees’ Retirement System.
Sean Deasy and Raymond Eldridge of CB Richard Ellis represented AvalonBay in the deal.
Fit to Print
John Lang Homes’ new Corona del Mar residential development, Sailhouse, garnered a write-up in the Feb. 24 issue of The New York Times for its “new urbanist” design. A high-density project in downtown Corona del Mar, Sailhouse’s attached and detached homes are priced at $600,000 to $1 million.
Watermarke Clarification
A few weeks ago, I wrote that Sares Regis Group’s 535-unit Watermarke Apartments in Irvine would cost an estimated $250,000 per unit. Actually, that figure refers to the estimated “value” of each apartment at the project’s completion.
Bits and Pieces:
Costa Mesa-based developer and property manager Donahue Schriber has begun a $2 million refurbishment of the Peninsula Shopping Center, a 300,000-square-foot project in Rolling Hills Estates. Long Beach-based architect Perkowitz + Ruth, Studio One Eleven is designing the project, which is set for a summer completion date Newport Beach-based residential real estate firm Strada Properties has grown to more than 100 agents since its creation in late 2000, according to Steve High, Strada’s president. The company holds the No. 2 market share in the Newport Beach/Coastal Orange County area, High said Santa Ana-based Benefit Land Title Co., a regional title and settlement services company, has consolidated with other regional providers Commerce Land Title Inc. and Metropolitan Title and Guaranty Co. to form Commerce Title, a national operation. All three companies are subsidiaries of Dallas-based Centex Corp . The Irvine office of Pepper Construction, a member of Chicago’s Pepper Construction Group LLC, has completed the first phase of a West Coast distribution center for Scandinavian furniture retailer IKEA International. The 850,000 square foot facility is in Lebec The Orange County office of McCarthy Building Cos. landed a $42.4 million contract with University of California, San Diego, to build a research facility for the university’s School of Medicine.
