Real estate owner and developer Hines Interests LP has sold a pair of properties it owned near John Wayne Airport for nearly $65 million.
Affiliates of the Houston-based company, which has built an Orange County office portfolio of more than 3 million square feet over the past decade, recently completed the sale of two of its oldest buildings in the area.
A venture between Hines and Oaktree Capital Management LP of Los Angeles sold the Irvine Corporate Center, a 126,633-square-foot office at 1821 E. Dyer Road, in the largest of the deals.
The fully leased building went for an estimated $34 million, or about $268 per square foot, according to brokers with the Irvine office of Cushman & Wakefield who worked on the deal.
An affiliate of MX3 Ventures, a Newport Beach real estate investor with ties to former Santa Ana-based storage device maker STEC Inc., was the buyer.
It’s the largest reported purchase in Orange County for MX3 and its affiliates, whose ownership group includes Manouch Moshayedi, former chairman and chief executive of STEC, and Mark Moshayedi, Manouch’s brother and STEC’s co-founder.
STEC was sold in 2013 to a San Jose-based subsidiary of Irvine-based Western Digital Corp. for $340 million. The company now operates as part of Western Digital unit HGST Inc.
A good deal of the Moshayedi family fortune has been reinvested in commercial real estate, and family members are reported to have made about a dozen notable deals in and around Orange County over the past seven years or so.
The family’s largest known deal took place in 2010 when it paid a reported $94.5 million for the Shoppes at Chino Hills, a 377,966-square-foot mall in the southwestern part of San Bernardino County.
MX3 sold the mall last October for $147 million to Dunhill Partners Inc., a Dallas-based investor.
Irvine Corporate Center is one of two MX3 acquisitions reported in California over the past month; it also paid about $39 million for Rincon Center, a two-building, 156,094-square-foot office in North San Jose.
Hines and Oaktree paid a reported $8.4 million for Irvine Corporate Center in 2012 when large parts of the office were vacant.
The two-story building about a block from the Costa Mesa (55) Freeway has a Santa Ana address but is considered part of the Irvine Business Complex, the largely commercial area surrounding John Wayne Airport.
The property got a renovation estimated at over $10 million and now is fully leased to semiconductor company Kulicke & Soffa Industries Inc. and media firm The Enthusiast Network, which was formerly known as Source Interlink Media.
Gillette Avenue Sale
Hines’ other big local deal involved a real estate investment trust it manages that sold 17600 Gillette Ave., a 106,000-square-foot building about a mile from the airport.
The building traded hands last month for $30.9 million, or about $291 per square foot.
Hines Global REIT paid about $20.4 million for the building in 2010.
W.P. Carey Inc., a New York-based investor, purchased the Gillette Ave. building, according to Cushman executive director Jeff Cole, who along with colleague Ed Hernandez represented Hines in its two recent sales.
Investors are increasingly bidding up the prices of quality low-rise buildings in the airport area with creative-office features, because those offices can command higher rents than many area high-rise buildings, Cole said.
“As an active investor, Hines is pleased to have been associated with these quality assets during the time we owned them. We look forward to placing more capital in Orange County,” said Ray Lawler, who leads the Hines Investment and Development Office in Irvine.
The two-story property’s fully leased to church Harvest Christian Fellowship, which uses it for its Orange County campus.
