One of Orange County’s largest and best-leased offices has hit the sales market.
The Bank of America campus in Brea, a 637,503-square-foot office property at 275 Valencia Ave., was recently listed for sale by the local office of Cushman & Wakefield Inc.
The building is expected to fetch a price near $120 million, or roughly $190 per square foot, according to market watchers.
The office, located on a 31.6-acre property near the La Floresta residential development on Imperial Highway, is fully leased to Bank of America, which has nine years left on its current lease.
The property is the largest leased, single-user office building in OC, according to Cushman & Wakefield. It’s designed as a headquarters with executive offices, an administration area and call center space.
Bank of America has occupied the building since it was built about 30 years ago and currently uses it as an operations facility. The bank, which employs about 3,000 people in Brea, is the city’s largest employer, according to the city’s most recent data from 2010.
The campus is “a critical ‘core facility’ for Bank of America located in a submarket that is poised for significant rental rate increases and is experiencing tremendous new commercial and residential development,” said Jeff Cole, Cushman & Wakefield executive director, who has the listing for the property with colleagues Rick Kaplan, Ed Hernandez and Robert Lambert.
A unit of New York-based Lexington Realty Trust owns the property, which it acquired in 2007. It is the real estate investor’s largest property, according to its latest annual report, which valued it at about $87 million.
Brokerage Boost
The impending merger of brokerages Savills PLC and Studley Inc. is expected to have an outsized effect in Orange County.
The $260 million deal, announced this month but reportedly in the works since late last year, will bring together London-based Savills, a dominant residential and commercial brokerage in Europe and Asia, with New York-based tenant representation firm Studley, which has 25 offices in the U.S.
Studley’s Irvine office ranked No. 18 among OC commercial brokerages last year in terms of volume of deals, with $410 million in lease and sales work, according to Business Journal data.
OC is one of only three U.S. locations where the two firms have overlapping offices. Savills opened a local office in 2011 headed by Executive Managing Director Robert Stamm.
Stamm and his five-person team are expected to move to Studley’s offices at the Atrium Towers complex after the merger is completed in about a month. The combined companies will be known as Savills Studley.
The deal will give Studley’s OC office, which already generates nearly half of its business from nonlocal work, much-needed global reach to serve corporate tenants with international operations, according to Royce Sharf, executive vice president and branch manager of Studley’s Irvine office, which has about 15 brokers.
The merger also gives the OC office of the combined companies a strong presence in the capital markets business, particularly with overseas investors looking for deals in the U.S., Stamm said.
“We share a lot of the same business practices,” he said. “We’re very similar in structure.”
Recent deals outside OC for Sharf include a lease in Nebraska for Pacific Life Insurance Co. of Omaha, a subsidiary of Newport Beach-based Pacific Mutual Holding Co.
PacLife will be the anchor tenant in a new 125,000-square-foot office going up in an Omaha community called Aksarben Village.
Oceana Under Way
Agoura Hills-based apartment developer Amcal Multi-Housing Inc. has broken ground on Oceana Apartments, a 78-unit affordable housing project near the intersection of Beach Boulevard and Talbert Avenue in Huntington Beach.
Oceana is at the former site of an Enterprise Rent-a-Car at 18151 Beach Blvd. The 2.1-acre property sold this year for a reported $6.15 million in a deal brokered by Mike Hunter and Allison Rawlins Tift with the Irvine office of Land Advisors Organization.
Amcal said TRI Pointe Homes Inc., an Irvine-based homebuilder with a pair of developments under way in the city, provided inclusionary financing for the project. City records show the builder provided $2 million for the project.
Oceana will be Amcal’s fifth affordable housing development in Orange County.
