Fullerton University Village, a 100-unit student housing community within walking distance of California State University-Fullerton, has been sold to a Dana Point investor that’s planning a renovation of the 45-year-old property.
Crown Acquisitions Inc., a privately held real estate firm that buys commercial, multifamily and student housing properties, recently completed the buy of the 4-acre property at 2000 Oxford Ave.
The complex is across the street from the Fullerton Arboretum on the northern edge of the school’s campus near the intersection of Yorba Linda Boulevard and the Orange (57) Freeway.
The property’s 100 units hold 290 beds. It has two studio units and six two-bedroom and 92 three-bedroom apartments, with an overall average unit size of 906 square feet. Rents average about $1,130 per bed, according to marketing material.
Units at the garden-style complex include refrigerators, flat-screen televisions, and all utilities are included in the cost of rent.
Crown got a $29 million loan to fund the $33.5 million purchase. It’s planning improvements to the property, according to CBRE Group Inc., whose Scott Peterson and Bill Chiles with the brokerage’s Capital Markets Debt & Structured Finance team worked on getting the buyer’s loan.
CBRE said it secured “an aggressive short-term, floating-rate loan through a national debt fund,” for the borrower, which property records show is a unit of Philadelphia-based RAIT Financial Trust.
The seller was a tenant-in-common partnership represented by brokerage Berkadia, whose Shane Shafer in the firm’s Irvine office worked on the deal along with Berkadia’s student housing team.
The property is the only multifamily asset in Orange County that Crown’s website indicates the company owns. It owns multiple rental properties in San Diego, Los Angeles and Tuscon, Ariz.
Crown also owns two offices in San Clemente, according to its website. The company focuses “on creating value from overlooked and undervalued” properties, according to CBRE.
The Fullerton property’s new owners have a number of opportunities to increase revenues, including moving from a 10-month lease to a 12-month schedule, eliminating a meal plan component, and adding 23 studio units that could take the place of the food service option, according to Berkadia’s marketing materials.
Cal State-Fullerton’s student body is more than 40,000, but it has only about 1,900 dorms on its campus, making off-site student rentals a necessity, Berkadia’s marketing documents note.
Cars to Toy Story
The new owners of the 7755 Irvine Center Drive building in the Spectrum area of Irvine—the former local headquarters of Mazda North American Operations—are seeking to lease out the top floors of the building.
In late February, ThreeSixty Group, an Irvine-based toy and gadget designer and distributor that operates as MerchSource locally, paid about $42 million to buy the five-story office along the Santa Ana (5) Freeway, both as an investment and for its own uses.
The 126,300-square-foot building is a big step up in size for MerchSource. Its current headquarters in Irvine, which an affiliate of the company also owns, totals about 26,000 square feet.
MerchSource needs more space after extensive expansion over the past few years, including the $100 million buy of the Sharper Image brand this year and the $45 million buy of the FAO Schwarz brand in October.
It still has excess space to fill at the newly acquired building. Brokers with the Irvine office of Cushman & Wakefield Inc. recently listed for lease the two top floors, which total 40,000 square feet.
The floors are an “ideal corporate headquarters opportunity,” Cushman says. The space comes with building-top signage.
Mazda is moving its last employees out of the building this month as it relocates a few blocks away to the 200 Spectrum Center tower.
MerchSource will move into the bottom three floors of the recently bought office early next year, according to Cushman Executive Director Don Yahn, who has the listing for the top two floors along with colleague Brett Swartzbaugh.
Yahn and Swartzbaugh are also trying to lease MerchSource’s current Irvine office once the company moves. The two-story, 26,000-square-foot building at 15 Cushing is about a mile and a half from the 7755 Irvine Center Drive building.
