Two Central Orange County offices in Orange and Anaheim have traded hands in deals totaling about $61 million.
In the largest of the transactions, Denver-based EverWest Real Estate Investors LLC bought 999 Town & Country Road, a four-story office in Orange south of the Garden Grove (22) Freeway and a few blocks from Santa Ana’s MainPlace Mall.
Property records show the 99,000-square-foot building went for $32 million, or about $324 per square foot.
EverWest said it bought it in a venture with Chilean-based fund manager Frontal Trust.
It’s the only Orange County property in EverWest’s portfolio, according to the investor’s website, which shows it owns about a dozen properties in California.
The property was built in the 1970s but was recently renovated by prior owner, San Diego-based Westcore Properties. Among additions were a five-story parking structure.
Los Angeles-based engineering and design firm Aecom recently consolidated its space in the building under a new 10-year lease, and now occupies the bottom three floors. Aecom, which is Orange County’s third-largest engineering firm by billings, has been there for about 20 years.
The top floor is about 25,000 square feet and available for lease, according to Erik Good, who oversees EverWest’s Southern California acquisition activity.
The investor said it spent about $225 million on property buys along the West Coast this year.
Westcore bought 999 Town & Country in 2014 for a reported $25.3 million.
It subsequently sold excess land on a portion of the property to a unit of Horsham, Pa.-based builder Toll Brothers Inc., which is building a 262-unit apartment development there.
The property is across the street from the Town & Country Office Park, an eight-building complex that was sold in August to San Diego-based Fairfield Residential LLC for $70.5 million.
Fairfield plans to knock down the offices and build a residential development on the 12-acre site. More than 700 units are planned in a mix of for-sale townhomes and apartments.
“There is transformative urbanization taking place in this neighborhood that will create a true live-work environment for our property,” Good said.
Derreck Barker and Michael Leggett of brokerage HFF LP represented Westcore Properties in the sale, while EverWest represented itself.
Stadium Centre
Also trading hands this month is Anaheim’s Stadium Centre, a six-story, 122,080-square-foot office property a short walk from Angel Stadium.
The building, at 2099 S. State College Blvd., sold for $28.8 million, or nearly $236 per square foot, according to the local capital markets team of Newmark Knight Frank, whose brokers worked on the deal.
It was sold by a venture headed by Irvine-based Greenlaw Partners; the brokers involved in the deal didn’t disclose a buyer. Property records show the buyer to be a unit of Westbrook Partners, a New York-based investor that’s been a frequent partner of Greenlaw in real estate buys.
Real estate sources said that Greenlaw will keep a stake in the office, which was one of the investor’s initial investments when it started operations about 15 years ago.
The office was 98% occupied at the time of the sale; large tenants include the Economic Development Department, Anaheim Visitors Bureau, Gexpro, Securitas and Rolf.
The immediate area around Stadium Centre, like the Town & Country property, is getting a surge of apartment development at a variety of Platinum Triangle projects.
The property “is a very well-located mid-rise office building that has had a historically high occupancy and will continue to benefit from all the new multifamily urban development throughout the Platinum Triangle,” said Newmark Managing Director Paul Jones, who worked on the deal with colleagues Kevin Shannon, Blake Bokosky, Brunson Howard and Brandon White.
