An importer and distributor of automotive parts with headquarters in the Bay Area is moving its Southern California regional distribution center from Torrance to a newly built facility in Brea.
Newark-based WorldPac Inc. recently signed a 240,000-square-foot lease at the Imperial Distribution Center in one of the largest industrial deals signed in Orange County over the past few months.
The facility, at 1225 W. Imperial Blvd., totals 367,194 square feet and opened last year. WorldPac’s lease fills the development between Long Beach-based Pacific Industrial and Clarion Partners LLC, a New York-based real estate investment manager.
The deal takes one of the few remaining big new blocks of industrial development in Orange County off the market. There were less than 300,000 square feet of new product under construction in the county at the end of last year, according to brokerage data.
WorldPac signed a 10-year lease for the building and will move into the facility this April, according to Rick Ellison, executive director for the Irvine office of Cushman & Wakefield Inc.
Ellison represented the owners of the building in the lease along with his son, Randy Ellison, an associate director at Cushman & Wakefield.
The location is a step up in space for WorldPac’s regional distribution center, according to Rick Ellison. The company’s current location runs a little more than 100,000 square feet, according to brokerage data.
The Torrance location is one of five U.S. distribution centers, according to WorldPac’s website. The largest, a facility near Dallas that opened last year, runs about 500,000 square feet.
The distribution centers are used to serve its roughly 120 locations throughout North America and Puerto Rico, according to the company’s website.
WorldPac is a unit of Roanoke, Va.-based Advance Auto Parts Inc. It offers more than 120,000 products for over 40 import and domestic vehicle lines. The company primarily serves commercial customers, mostly independent automotive service centers.
It has a trio of Orange County branch locations in Fullerton, Laguna Hills and Santa Ana. The company’s stores average about 27,000 square feet, according to its latest annual report.
Advance Auto Parts has a $12 billion market capitalization and a chain of retail stores that serve individual and commercial customers. It acquired WorldPac in 2014 in a $2 billion portfolio deal.
It has been trimming the number of retail locations the past few years in the face of online competition, however, while growing its commercial-focused WorldPac business, which specializes in imported car parts, according to the company’s latest annual report.
Another Big Tenant
The Imperial Distribution Center is on a roughly 17-acre site, about two miles west of the Orange (57) Freeway and near the intersection of Imperial and Puente streets.
The site previously held an RV storage facility.
A venture between Irvine-based Greenlaw Partners and New York-based Westbrook Partners LLC paid a reported $18 million for the site in 2013 and got the land entitled for the industrial project.
That venture sold the land to Pacific Industrial and Clarion in 2015 for an undisclosed price; sources not involved in the deal estimated at the time that the land traded for about $26 million.
The new development features 55 dock-high doors, 36-foot minimum clearance, and 4,976 square feet of two-story office space, according to the developers.
Shortly after completing the building, the development landed another big tenant for the facility: Atosa Catering Equipment Inc., a manufacturer of commercial refrigeration and other kitchen products.
That deal, struck last October, was for the remaining 127,000 square feet. The building serves as Atosa’s Southern California headquarters, which had been in Walnut.
