The 4000 Metropolitan Drive office in Orange, a 183,000-square-foot building just off the Garden Grove (22) Freeway near the Outlets at Orange shopping center, has traded hands for the third time in six years in one of the largest local office sales so far this year.
An investment fund overseen by Chicago-based Boyd Watterson Asset Management LLC recently completed the purchase of the four-story office, according to property records. It sold for about $61 million, or roughly $333 per square foot, according to CoStar Group Inc. estimates.
The building is nearly full and leased to government tenants, including the FBI.
Boyd Watterson has a real estate investment account that buys commercial properties leased to the federal government.
The seller was an affiliate of Boston-based Spaulding & Slye Investments that also focuses on government-leased buildings and that bought the property in 2014 for a reported $56 million.
The office is one of the few buildings on the western edge of the Outlets at Orange that isn’t owned by Greenlaw Partners. The Irvine-based investor and developer snapped it up in 2010 for $12 million when it was largely empty, and sold it to Spaulding & Slye after leasing it out.
Greenlaw plans to build a trio of apartment complexes totaling 821 units, plus a 165-room hotel, on excess land it owns at other office properties in the immediate vicinity of the outlet shopping center.
The development will be called Orange Collection, according to city filings.
Savi Sale
The largest office campus in Yorba Linda has hit the market a little less than three years after last trading hands.
Savi Tech Center, a four-building business park just off the Riverside (91) Freeway that’s part of the Savi Ranch business and retail development, recently was listed for sale at an undisclosed price.
The 372,000-square-foot property is owned by a venture between Houston-based Hines Interests LP and Oaktree Capital Management LP in Los Angeles, which bought the property in 2013 in an online auction for an estimated $55 million. Irvine-based real estate auction site Ten-X, in conjunction with the local office of brokerage Cushman & Wakefield Inc., oversaw the auction.
Cushman & Wakefield’s Jeff Cole, Jeff Chiate and Ed Hernandez have the listing for the property this time.
The 19-acre campus is fully leased and includes the two largest employers in Yorba Linda among its tenants.
San Diego-based medical device maker CareFusion Corp., a developer of healthcare products, occupies a 141,000-square-foot building at the complex as an R&D facility, and Nobel Biocare USA Inc., a maker of dental implant technology, occupies two other buildings that combine for 125,000 square feet for its North American headquarters.
The property brings in about $5.7 million in annual rents, according to Cushman & Wakefield’s marketing materials for the campus.
Mega Lease
Newport Beach-based industrial developer Western Realco has landed a tenant to take all of a big property it recently built in Riverside.
Ascena Retail Group Inc., a Mahwah, N.J.-based retailer of women’s clothing, this month announced it signed a 10-year lease for the entire 582,772-square-foot industrial building in Alesandro Business Center near the junction of the 215 and 60 freeways in Riverside.
It will be the first West Coast distribution center for Ascena, whose brands include Ann Taylor, LOFT, Lou & Grey, and Lane Bryant.
Calling All Local Developers
The Business Journal’s annual list of Orange County’s top commercial developers will appear in our June 13 issue. A surge of ground-up and redevelopment projects has kicked off in the past few years, and we want to make sure none of them are omitted from the ranking.
If your company has completed or broken ground on an office, industrial, retail, hotel or mixed-use development in the county in the past year, contact our research director, Dana Truong, at truong@ocbj.com to request a survey for the list.
The deadline for entries is May 31.
Commercial projects larger than 50,000 square feet are likely to be large enough to qualify for the list. Creative-office and other substantive redevelopment work on existing properties are also candidates.
