Irvine-based real estate investor and developer Great Far East has its hands full getting a big office and hotel development next to John Wayne Airport through the entitlement stages, but it still found time this month to snap up one of the best office properties in the San Gabriel Valley city of Diamond Bar.
The privately held company recently completed the buy of Bridgegate Plaza, a three-story multitenant office of about 135,000 square feet.
The 15-year-old office is at 1440 Bridgegate Drive near the intersection of the Pomona (60) and Orange (57) freeways and a little more than 5 miles north of Orange County.
The property sold for about $27.3 million, or a little more than $200 per square foot, according to brokerage data. The seller was an affiliate of Los Angeles-based Colony Northstar Inc., which had owned it for about a decade.
Great Far East’s deal comes at a somewhat discounted price compared to other fully leased offices in the area due to upcoming expiring leases and the need to make upgrades to the property, according to Jeff Cole, executive managing director with the capital markets team of Cushman & Wakefield who worked on the deal with colleague Ed Hernandez and CBRE Group Inc.’s John Bibeau and Steven Saunders.
The office was 78% leased at the time of sale, and the leases of the two publicly traded tenants that occupy the bulk of the project, QTC Management, a unit of Reston, Va.-based-based Leidos, and Houston-based Insperity, expire in the next year and a half.
The area’s office market, by comparison, has an average vacancy rate of just 5.5%, among the lowest office vacancies in the San Gabriel Valley, according to Cushman & Wakefield’s data.
Cole said the office was “a very attractive investment opportunity, given it’s a well-located institutional-quality asset with strong tenancy, plus great value-add potential.”
A few changes are in store for the office, according to the new owners. “We plan to improve upon the common areas and create indoor-outdoor experiences in line with the changing demands of office tenants,” said Landon Wright, a partner at Great Far East who joined the firm this year from Milan Capital Management.
Great Far East has a number of office properties in and around Irvine, including the nine-story Irvine Spectrum office that holds the operations of restaurant chain Yard House USA Inc.
The company is working on getting necessary approvals for a two-tower commercial development across the street from the airport in Irvine. It’s proposed building the Landmark on seven acres it owns on MacArthur Boulevard near the intersection of Campus Drive.
The project would include a 19-story, 448,200-square-foot office as well as a 15-story, 323,415-square-foot hotel with 386 rooms.
Airport-related land use commissions have recommended lower heights for the buildings, however.
Irvine City Council, which has authority to override the airport commission, last week postponed a decision to move ahead with the project until mid-September.
STEC Asset
One of Orange County’s wealthiest families has put up one of its commercial real estate properties for sale: 3001 & 3009 Daimler St., a two-building office campus totaling 76,599 square feet just off the Costa Mesa (55) Freeway in Santa Ana. The local office of brokerage HFF LP has the listing for the property, which marketing materials note was recently vacated.
The offices were once the headquarters of computer storage device maker STEC Inc., which sold in 2013 to a San Jose-based subsidiary of then Irvine-based Western Digital Corp. for $340 million. It now operates as part of Western Digital unit HGST Inc., and local jobs once based at the Santa Ana facility have been relocated to Irvine.
STEC co-founder Manouch Moshayedi and his family, which operate much of their vast local real estate portfolio under Mx3 Ventures, held onto ownership of the Santa Ana office following the sale to Western Digital but are now looking to sell.
An asking price for the buildings hasn’t been disclosed.
