Newport Beach’s glitzy 520 Newport Center Drive building, which opened in 2014, could soon see its first notable eviction, along with its first big sublease of space.
Law firm Eagan Avenatti, which leases a little more than 8,300 square feet at the 21-story tower next to Fashion Island, has reportedly had eviction proceedings taken against it by building owner Irvine Co.
The landlord, whose headquarters are next to the building, alleges Eagan Avenatti didn’t pay rent for a 14th-floor office and three storage spaces in July and August, according to Orange County Superior Court filings first reported by political and pop culture news site The Daily Beast.
Eagan Avenatti partner Michael Avenatti—who’s gotten a lot of recent press attention for representing actress Stormy Daniels in her legal tangles with Donald Trump—has been floated as a potential presidential candidate.
The eviction action isn’t the only or largest financial issue reportedly facing the law firm; it was recently hit with a $10 million judgement in a legal dispute with a former colleague, and has had several tax liens filed against it in recent months, according to press reports.
Representatives of Irvine Co. declined to comment on the status of the eviction action. The law firm still lists 520 Newport Center as its headquarters, and has a rendering of the tower on its website.
Only about 7,500 square feet is available for rent at the 326,000-square-foot tower, according to Irvine Co.’s website. The lower-floor spaces have monthly rents as high as $5.80 per square foot, the website shows.
A sublease of another 17,800-square-foot spot, now occupied by Acacia Research Corp., is expected (see tech column, below).
Top-floor rents are over $8 per square foot, a high-water mark for Orange County offices, according to earlier Business Journal reports.
Pole Position
Irvine’s Jamboree Promenade, a three-building retail property near John Wayne Airport that sold this past summer, has gotten new financing.
I reported in June that a Newport Beach-based affiliate of Singapore-based Pole Capital paid $42.5 million for the property across the street from the new Boardwalk office development.
The 56,878-square-foot project at the intersection of Jamboree Road and Dupont Drive traded hands for $747 per square foot, one of the highest square footage prices for an area retail property not along the coastline.
It was the first U.S. real estate investment of the Pole Capital unit, which state records show has a domestic location in Newport Center.
The company has been described in regional publications as a family-owned private equity firm started in 2014. It invests in Singapore, the U.S. and Australia.
The June sale was an all-cash affair, but Pole Capital recently got $20 million in debt financing to recapitalize the property, according to CBRE’s Debt and Structured Finance team in Newport Beach, which arranged the seven-year loan for the borrower.
“We were able to navigate through some lender concerns due to this being the sponsor’s first acquisition and financing in the United States,” said CBRE’s Shaun Moothart in a statement.
Ultimately, “we were able to deliver five years of interest-only debt from an institutional fiduciary fund manager at a very competitive sub-4.5% fixed rate with prepayment flexibility,” said Moothart, who worked on the deal with colleagues Bruce Francis, Dana Summers, Bob Ybarra and Doug Birrell.
The center is 97% occupied and anchored by CorePower Yoga, The Melting Pot and Daily Grill.
Indy Logistics
Newport Beach-based CT Realty has bought a 95-acre parcel in greater Indianapolis for the development of a 1-million-square-foot industrial building.
Privately-held CT Realty, one of the country’s largest developers of large logistics properties, bought the land from GDI Companies, master planner of the surrounding Crossroads Logistics Center where the project will be built.
The building’s construction is underway and it is scheduled to be completed next year.
Terms of the land sale were undisclosed. The project’s construction cost is valued at more than $50 million.
The deal adds to CT Realty’s growing development pipeline in the Midwest. It’s also building a 1.3 million-square-foot project in the Chicago area valued at about $125 million.
