Cary, N.C.-based SpectraSite Communications Inc. has leased 20,280 square feet of space near John Wayne Airport for its new Southern California regional headquarters.
The provider of antennae sites, towers and network services to wireless communications companies and broadcasters has operated in OC for about a year but is moving into larger space.
“They were in a much smaller capacity in an executive suite in Irvine,” said Barry Gail, the Cushman & Wakefield broker who represented SpectraSite. “This is their first permanent foray. It’s an efficient floor-plate in the heart of the airport area on a main thoroughfare.”
Initially, SpectraSite will take 15,000 square feet at Irvine’s Dupont Centre, with an option for an additional 5,000 square feet. Industry sources estimate the initial value of the lease at $2.2 million over five years. The office will house 60 to 70 employees, including sales people, property managers and tower operations and improvement staff. SpectraSite contracts out the construction of new communications towers.
“They took about three-quarters of a floor,” said Steve Ames, assistant vice president and western regional executive director for USAA Realty Co., one of the building’s owners. Ames said the deal caps a busy year of leasing at Dupont Centre, a five- and an eight-story complex totaling 250,000 square feet.
“We started off this year in the mid- to high 70% occupancy,” Ames said. “We’ve done just under 100,000 square feet this year and are at about 96% occupancy.”
SpectraSite, a unit of SpectraSite Holdings Inc., owns, leases and manages communications towers on just about anything tall year, $1.3 billion lease of 3,900 existing and 800 planned towers nationwide from Pacific Bell parent SBC Communications Inc. The deal added approximately 400 towers in Orange County and 700 to 800 throughout California.
In February, SpectraSite signed a three-year deal worth $155 million to lease 430 Verizon Wireless towers in Southern California and to build additional ones for Verizon. SpectraSite now counts more than 1,500 towers in the Southland.
In all, SpectraSite owns or manages more than 15,000 network sites, including 4,000 towers. If pending acquisitions close, the company could count more than 20,000 sites with 9,000 towers. Other SpectraSite customers include AT & T; Wireless Group, Nextel Communications Inc. and Sprint PCS.
Because of aesthetic and environmental concerns,SpectraSite towers can be more than 100 feet tall,the gear often is camouflaged as church steeples or palm trees. A large crucifix on a Lutheran church in the Dover Shores area of Newport Beach was enlarged to include a tower, while Newport Beach’s Queen of Angels Church has one in its steeple. The obelisk at the Irvine Spectrum Entertainment Center also houses a tower. n
