A 290,000-square-foot Fullerton shopping center anchored by Sam’s Club and Home Depot is on the market, with offers due this week.
Brokers with Newmark Knight Frank’s Newport Beach office are marketing the fully-leased Fullerton Crossings shopping center on behalf of Merlone Geier Partners, a San Diego-based retail investor that has owned the site for more than 15 years.
The center at 625 S. Placentia Ave. is on about 30 acres of land. The site is entitled for about 83,000 square feet of additional retail development, as well as a new location for fast-casual chain Farmer Boys that’s slated to open this fall.
Newmark’s Managing Director Glenn Rudy, part of the brokerage’s retail capital markets division, said the entire four-parcel property is expected to sell for about $100 million, which works out to a price of nearly $345 per square foot for the existing buildings at the center.
It is receiving “a wide array of interest,” from potential buyers, including institutional investors, local developers and private family offices, he said.
“This is a rare opportunity that will retain aggressive pricing,” Rudy said, adding that the property is “delivered to market unencumbered of any existing debt.”
The firm plans to select a buyer by the end of March and to close about two months after.
The Fullerton site—a few blocks west of the Orange (57) Freeway, along Placentia Avenue, was one of the first California locations for Home Depot, Rudy said. It has been a tenant since the mid-1980s.
The home improvement retailer and Sam’s Club recently completed upgrades to its facilities, and will remain at the site for at least 20 and 16 years, respectively.
Other retailers likely to join the center range from growing shops, restaurants, or service retailers like a car wash facility.
Merlone Geier has yet to announce plans for its most closely watched development site in OC, the Five Lagunas mall in Laguna Hills. The retail investor and developer abandoned previously stated plans for the site last year, after a series of anchors closed shop at the 68-acre site next to the Santa Ana (5) Freeway and El Toro Road.
Anaheim Lease
A redevelopment of Goodman North America’s 143,000-square-foot industrial property in Anaheim—the company’s only Orange County property—is still planned, despite reports of a new lease at the site.
The U.S. division of Australia’s Goodman Group, one of the world’s largest industrial developers, has a growing base of domestic projects being headed by its office in Irvine. Last year, it made its first OC purchase, Anaheim’s 1256 N. Magnolia Ave. property.
The site, near the Santa Ana (5) and Riverside (91) freeways interchange, is on about 12 acres. Goodman paid $36 million, or about $250 per square foot, for the property in September.
Then as now, the company’s website stated that the existing properties could be knocked down to make way for a build-to-suit project totaling about 244,000 square feet.
Goodman has been leasing the project as is to Anaheim-based OCRV Storage Inc., which first signed on to occupy 138,000 square feet in 2014, according to records from real estate market tracker CoStar Group Inc.
CoStar recently reported a new lease was struck at the site for OCRV, but that deal is a short-term one, according to a Goodman representative.
The storage company is in the process of vacating the property to make way for a long-term tenant, according to the Goodman spokesperson.
In the meantime, the firm is planning minor upgrades including additional parking and cosmetic renovations to be completed by the end of summer.
CBRE Group Inc. is marketing the site, which can be a full campus for a single tenant or separate leases for multiple firms.
Long-term plans may include expanding the existing 104,849-square-foot building into a 205,860-square-foot facility, and maintaining the other existing 38,399-square-foot building.
The property is on the smaller scale for Goodman, whose U.S. projects are often more than twice the size of the Magnolia property, and cater to large logistics center users like Amazon.
The company has a development pipeline in excess of $2.7 billion in the U.S.
Much of its West Coast development is centered in the Inland Empire.
