A nearly 12-acre site close to Santa Ana’s MainPlace Mall that’s being eyed for a residential development has changed hands for an eye-opening price.
An affiliate of San Diego-based Fairfield Residential LLC recently closed on the purchase of Town & Country Office Park, an eight-building office complex a few blocks from the mall and in the city of Orange.
The property, which holds about 200,000 square feet of office space, sold for $70.5 million, or nearly $350 per square foot, according to property records.
That’s about $5.8 million an acre for the land. The deal is one of the largest infill residential land sales of the year here.
Privately-held Fairfield, whose website shows it owns eight rental projects in OC, isn’t planning to keep the site an office park for long. In May, I reported that the company was working with the city of Orange to get entitlements to turn it into a 727-unit residential development.
The project would include two five-story apartment buildings with a combined 653 units built around seven-story parking structures. Seventy-four for-sale townhomes would also be built.
Fairfield said at the time in city records that it would raze the office park and build the residential development by 2021.
The property sits a block south of the Garden Grove (22) Freeway across the street from the Orange Financial Center office complex and about a quarter-mile east of MainPlace Mall, Orange County’s ninth-largest shopping center by sales.
The area, which straddles Orange and Santa Ana, has become a hotbed of apartment development over the past few years.
MainPlace Mall’s owners are also looking to get into the act. In June, I reported that Dallas-based Centennial Real Estate has proposed a massive mixed-use redevelopment for the mall, involving a mix of apartments, offices and hotel rooms being added around the site’s core retail space.
The project, still in the early stages of planning, would allow up to 1,900 residential units, 400 hotel rooms, 1.4 million square feet of retail space, and up to 750,000 square feet of office space.
Town & Country Office Park was sold by an affiliate of Santa Ana-based Colton Cos., a real estate owner that’s been shedding a large portion of its area portfolio the past few years, with several of its older office properties—including a big office park in Irvine next to John Wayne Airport—being snapped up by residential developers.
About a month ago, a Colton affiliate sold 2020 E. First St. in Santa Ana, a five-story, 112,000-square-foot office down the street from Xerox Centre.
It was bought by a venture headed by Long Beach-based Harbor Associates LLC for a reported $13.2 million. The new owners plan to keep it as an office but will be fixing it up.
Spurgeon Sale
The W.H. Spurgeon Building, one of downtown Santa Ana’s best-known buildings, has changed hands.
Associates Equity Fund, an Ontario-based entity that manages real estate investment funds for agents of commercial brokerage Lee & Associates, as well as other investors, recently closed on the purchase of the roughly 60,000-square-foot building at 202-208 W. Fourth St.
The building sold for just under $5.9 million, according to Blake Garrett, a broker with Huntington Beach-based Reef Group who repped AEF, as well as the sellers, a Santa Ana-based entity listed as Spurgeon Venture Ltd.
The cream-colored brick building was named after city founder William Spurgeon, and was built in 1913. The four-story structure was designated a historical landmark in 1979, according to news reports.
It’s in downtown Santa Ana’s shopping district near the intersection of Fourth Street and Broadway. The area has seen significant reinvestment the past few years, with a host of new eateries and retailers, including the 4th Street Market food hall and Esports Arena, as well as the recently-renovated Yost Theater.
The building was fully leased to a collection of smaller tenants at the time of sale, according to data from CoStar Group Inc.
