A nearly 80,000-square-foot industrial building near John Wayne Airport, last used by Obey Clothing and owned by an investor with ties to the maker of urban-styled clothes, has a new owner and a new tenant.
Newport Beach-based Alere Property Group LLC, an industrial investor that has made nearly $200 million in local acquisitions in the past year, recently completed the purchase of 17353 Derian Ave., a building about a block from the intersection of Von Karman and McGaw avenues.
The building sold for $16.6 million, or about $211 per square foot.
Cushman & Wakefield’s John Griffin and Max Wang brokered the deal on behalf of Alere, as well as the seller, an Irvine investor listed in property records as Group Effort 6 LLC.
The buyer’s manager is listed as Steven Mellgren, one of the owners of Obey Clothing, which makes clothes and accessories with designs licensed from graphic artist Shepard Fairey.
Fairey’s the designer of the iconic “Hope” posters used in Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns.
Mellgren’s group bought the Derian building in 2016 for a reported $11.8 million, or nearly $150 per square foot. It was previously owned by an affiliate of Irvine-based Royalty Carpet Mills Inc., a longtime area manufacturer that owned several buildings in the vicinity for its operations over the years. Royalty shuttered operations a couple years ago.
Obey, which has used a number of industrial buildings in Irvine for its operations over the past decade, is reported to have vacated the Derian Avenue building prior to its sale. It’s not known whether the clothing company has consolidated operations into another existing facility, or if it has a new location.
Alere has already secured a new tenant to take Obey’s place: Impressions Vanity, a mirror manufacturer that is relocating from its current location at 1402 Morgan Circle in Tustin. That building ran some 48,000 square feet, according to CoStar Group Inc. records.
The e-commerce driven company is known for its makeup mirrors with LED lights.
Local Buys
Notable recent area deals for Alere include the $128.5 million buy of Los Alamitos Corporate Center, a 17-building business park next to the Los Alamitos Race Course.
That deal closed in July, and was among the larger industrial sales in Orange County for the year. The park sold for about $187 per square foot.
Other Alere deals made in OC in the past year include an $11.4 million buy of a Tustin industrial warehouse building running 56,190 square feet, and the $22 million buy of a three-building industrial business park in Orange.
Alere now has north of 3.3 million square feet in OC, where industrial vacancy sits at 2.9%, hovering near historic lows, according to a quarterly market report by Newmark Knight Frank.
