The first batch of home sales at Great Park Neighborhoods’ Parasol Park in Irvine appears to be kicking off a few months earlier than initially expected.
Lennar Corp., a part-owner and the most active builder at the former El Toro Marine base, recently updated its website to show plans for its four collections of homes at Parasol Park, the next phase of development at Great Park Neighborhoods.
I reported in May, when groundwork was ramping up on the site of Parasol Park, that Aliso Viejo-based FivePoint Communities Inc., the master developer of the former base, was targeting an early 2017 launch for the project.
That’s still the case for the bulk of the 10 home collections, according to FivePoint, which said last week that Parasol Park’s grand opening will be in mid-January.
Lennar’s getting an early start on one batch of homes, though, which will open in November, according to its website.
The website lists four home types the company will build at Parasol Park, which is just north of Trabuco Road near the northwestern edge of the former base and next to Beacon Park, where the current collection of Great Park homes are being sold.
The new collections—called Lantern, Obsidian, Somerset and Windchime—will total 312 homes and range from about 1,700 square feet to nearly 3,200 square feet, according to Lennar.
The homes are a mix of attached townhomes, single-family detached condos, and triplex townhomes, according to the builder’s website, which did not list pricing for the soon-to-open homes.
A total of 727 homes are planned for Parasol Park, with Lennar having the largest batch in this phase of development, FivePoint said earlier this year.
Atlanta-based PulteGroup, Shea Homes in Walnut, Newport Beach-based William Lyon Homes, Irvine-based TRI Pointe Group Inc., and Aliso Viejo-based New Home Co. also are expected to build homes at the development.
Local Growth
Irvine-based Western Digital Corp. appears to be bracing for big cuts to its worldwide operations and head count, but it’s actually been expanding its local office presence, according to a reading of the storage product maker’s latest annual report.
The Business Journal reported last week that Western Digital—the largest technology company based in Orange County—will close three manufacturing plants and cut 1,900 jobs in Asia in a move that shifts more production to its sizeable Silicon Valley operations and elsewhere.
The company in the last two years has reduced about 20% of its global real estate holdings and shed roughly a quarter of its work force to 72,878 through June.
“We have additional plans to reduce that further,” Chief Executive Steve Milligan said late last month in an analyst conference call.
The company also has made some recent cost-cutting moves in Irvine. It has shed about 204 jobs here in the 12 months through May, or roughly 10.7% of the total at its Irvine campus at Park Place, according to Business Journal research.
The cuts come amid tepid global demand for hard disk drives—one of WD’s largest sources of revenue—and its integration of both SanDisk Corp. and HGST, two big companies it recently acquired.
The jobs cuts aren’t reflected in WD’s local office presence, though. The company has added close to 71,000 square feet of space—roughly the equivalent of three floors at a local high-rise office—to its headquarters over the past year, according to its latest annual report, which came out in late August.
That’s one of the biggest single-company expansions seen in OC’s office market during that time.
WD now leases about 538,000 square feet at Park Place’s midrise offices. It also has another 73,000 square feet in two Santa Ana buildings that held the operations of STEC Inc. before WD acquired the company in 2013.
The leases for those buildings run through July 2017, according to STEC’s last annual report in 2013. It’s not known whether the leases have since been extended.
WD’s largest collection of buildings in the U.S. is in San Jose, where it has about 3.3 million square feet, used for manufacturing, product development, R&D, administrative operations, and marketing and sales.
Its San Jose square footage has increased from 2.9 million a year ago, according to the company’s latest annual report.
