Waterfield Enterprises LLC, the parent of a family of financial service companies, is pushing for a much bigger profile in Orange County.
The privately-owned company, which has been in the mortgage and banking business since the 1920s, recently signed a 30,000-square-foot lease for office space in Irvine at the Tower 17 building.
The lease is for two floors of the 17-story building and will hold Waterfield’s West Coast headquarters. About 80 people are expected to be housed there.
The lease represents a tripling of the company’s local office space, which has been based at The Irvine Company’s Park Plaza campus.
The lease is valued at about $9 million. Waterfield plans to move in May.
Along with the lease comes a name change for the distinctive-looking office tower, located at Von Karman Avenue and Martin Street near John Wayne Airport.
The circular, 238,000-square-foot building is set to be renamed Waterfield Tower.
The lease is one of the larger expansions by an existing OC office tenant in the past year, and a coup for the office tower’s new owners. Laguna Hills-based developer Muller Co. and Rockwood Capital LLC of Greenwich, Conn., bought the office, along with two other buildings in Santa Ana and Orange, last May for $310 million from Maguire Properties Inc.
The naming rights to the building should bring more local attention to Waterfield and its affiliate companies. Businesses falling under the Waterfield umbrella include Affinity Financial Corp., which oversees a private-label banking business, National InterBank, and Waterfield Technologies, which provides Internet services to banks.
The move “is a hallmark of our entry into Orange County,” said Richard Waterfield, co-chairman and chief executive of the company.
Waterfield Enterprises’ headquarters and operations center are in Indianapolis, but Irvine has served as its largest administrative office for the past several years.
Richard Waterfield moved here in 1997. He said he fell in love with the area during a business trip from New York, when he was with Goldman Sachs & Co. Waterfield currently resides on Lido Island.
His brother, J. Randall Waterfield, heads up the company’s East Coast operations in New York.
The combined Waterfield Enterprises now counts about 220 employees nationally, following a big acquisition earlier this year.
In January, its Affinity Financial unit bought Bethesda, Md.-based American Partners Bank, a community bank that counts about $145 million in assets.
The Tower 17 offices will help the company consolidate administrative functions with newly acquired American Partners, according to Chief Financial Officer Roy Henderson.
The company plans to rebrand American Partners as Waterfield Bank, and expects to open one or two branches in OC annually. Its first local branch is expected to be at its new tower.
More bank acquisitions could be on the way. The bloodbath in the financial markets “is a wonderful opportunity if you have dry powder,” Waterfield said.
“We’ve been waiting around for an economy like this,” he said.
The company had an active mortgage business, under the Union Federal Bank of Indianapolis and Waterfield Mortgage Co. names, which posted record years in 2004 and 2005. In 2006, the business was sold to Sky Financial Group Inc. of Bowling Green, Ohio, in what turned out to be a fortuitous move.
“We got lucky in the timing,” Waterfield said.
The company has started originating mortgage loans again in recent months through American Partners. It did about $110 million in loans last month,a far cry from the $1 billion in originations its previous mortgage business was doing in its heyday.
“We’re staying extremely conservative,” Waterfield said.
Garrett Ellis and Scott Kenny, from the Anaheim office of CB Richard Ellis Group Inc., represented Waterfield Bank in the lease transaction. Greg May and Oliver Fleener of Grubb & Ellis Co.’s Newport Beach office represented the landlords. n
