Iteris Inc., a maker of sensors and other traffic gear, has leased about 50,000 square feet in Santa Ana where it plans to move its headquarters from Anaheim.
The company said last week it’s taking 52,116 square feet of space at Freeway Corporate Park, on Carnegie Avenue near the Costa Mesa (55) Freeway.
Iteris struck a seven-year lease for the space with an option to extend it for five more years.
Crown Realty & Development Inc. of Irvine owns Freeway Corporate Park, a two-building, 130,000-square-foot complex.
Iteris is set to move in September.
The move is one of the first big changes for Iteris since naming a new chief executive earlier this year.
Abbas Mohaddes, who has worked with the company since 1998, took over in March from Jack Johnson, Iteris’ former boss.
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Company’s current Anaheim HQ: former Odetics building |
Mohaddes had served as executive vice president and general manager.
Iteris, which trades on the American Stock Exchange and counts a market value of about $80 million, is an offshoot of Odetics Inc., a onetime Anaheim aerospace company that later melded into an incubator of other businesses. Odetics no longer is in business.
Iteris’ products include traffic signal sensors that help improve traffic flow, and sensors in cars that the company says act as “virtual rumble strips” when a vehicle drifts out of its lane.
The company has seen yearly revenue double in the past six years to about $57 million. It has spent heavily growing its business with an accumulated deficit of nearly $110 million.
In the March quarter, Iteris posted a profit of $1.6 million, nearly double that of a year earlier.
Iteris is moving from an Anaheim building near Disneyland, at 1515 S. Manchester Ave. Odetics previously owned the building and sold it in 2002.
Dental products maker Sybron Dental Specialties Inc., part of Washington, D.C.-based Danaher Corp., recently struck a lease to take over the Anaheim building later this year.
At Freeway Corporate Park, Iteris replaces the local operations of Los Gatos-based Netflix Inc., which outgrew its space. The online movie renter is moving to a larger building on South Susan Street in Santa Ana.
The lease calls for Iteris to pay monthly rents starting at $101,626, or about $1.95 per square foot. The monthly rent is set to increase to a maximum of $2.30 per square foot during the last year of the lease.
The site “is responsive to our layout requirement,” Mohaddes said in a statement. “We will gain space efficiency and our facility cost will actually decrease for the life of (the) lease.”
Crown Realty bought the two-building Santa Ana complex in 2005 for a reported $22.5 million.
The second building at the site, at 2501 Pullman Ave., is a 52,800-square-foot office leased by Bristol Park Medical Group for administrative uses.
Bristol Park is vacating the space by year’s end for space in Tustin, according to Robert Caudill, senior vice president for the Orange office of Grubb & Ellis Co.
Caudill, Matt Didier and Travis Beardslee of Grubb & Ellis represented Crown Realty in the Iteris lease. Rick Sherburne, Alex Hayden and Travis Boyd of Cushman & Wakefield Inc. represented Iteris.
