Olen Properties Corp. has added a prominent office tower in its hometown of Newport Beach to its growing real estate portfolio.
The privately held real estate investor and developer, one of Orange County’s largest commercial property owners, closed last week on the buy of the nine-story Newport Corporate Tower. The tower is about a mile from John Wayne Airport near the intersection of MacArthur Boulevard and Von Karman Avenue.
Olen paid a little more than $75.2 million, according to President Igor Olenicoff, the most it’s spent on an acquisition in the county in over a decade.
The sale works out to $395 per square foot for the 190,405-square-foot tower, which is 91% leased and includes U.S. Bank among notable tenants.
It was an all-cash buy, according to Olenicoff, whose fortune the Business Journal estimates to be $4.2 billion, the third-most of any OC resident.
“Olen does well when we really want a property,” Olenicoff told the Business Journal. “Our terms are impossible to beat.”
His company owns nearly 8 million square feet of commercial space, much of it in OC, plus a mostly out-of-town apartments portfolio of more than 13,000 units.
The tower property purchase includes a five-story parking structure used by some of the next-door properties.
Luxe Return
The deal marks a return of sorts for Olen to the luxury office market. It’s the company’s first office tower purchase in OC since buying the two-tower Century Centre office complex in Irvine in 2005 for a reported $134 million.
Most of its local buys have since been low-rise offices. With the latest, Olen’s OC office acquisitions have topped the $200 million mark since 2013, the just-closed deal the priciest of the bunch.
Olen also bought the 40-story One South Dearborn building in Chicago in 2006 for a reported $362 million.
With the Newport Beach office acquisition, plus a string of large apartment buys in the Atlanta suburbs and other markets, Olen is on pace to spend about $500 million buying property this year, according to Olenicoff.
He said CBRE Group Inc. will continue to head up leasing for the property but that Olen intends to handle property management.
3 of 8 Sold
American Realty Advisors sold Newport Corporate Tower in a deal brokered by Jeff Cole and Ed Hernandez with the Irvine office of Cushman and Wakefield Inc.
Rents there have been about $3.25 per square foot in recent lease transactions, according to brokerage data.
The building, at 4100 Newport Place, is one of just eight class A office towers in the city not owned by Newport Beach-based Irvine Co., according to Cushman & Wakefield’s marketing material. Three of the eight have changed hands since August in deals totaling more than $300 million.
Last month, a venture between Irvine-based Greenlaw Partners and the top two executives of Corona-based Monster Beverage Corp. paid a reported $58 million for 4400 MacArthur Blvd., a nine-story office about a block from Newport Corporate Tower (see related story, page 1).
Also trading hands last month: 4000 MacArthur, a class A office project with two 10-story buildings totaling 375,328 square feet and near the intersection of MacArthur and Jamboree Road. Goldman Sachs paid nearly $180 million for the property, sources tell the Business Journal, though details of the closed transaction haven’t been confirmed by the buyer or disclosed in property records.
The website of Hines Interests LP, which had owned the campus in a venture with Oaktree Capital Management of Los Angeles, said it sold the property in August but will continue to manage it.
