A seven-building office complex in Orange near MainPlace Mall in Santa Ana has been proposed as the site of a large residential complex featuring rental units and for-sale homes.
An affiliate of San Diego-based Fairfield Residential LLC filed plans with the city of Orange to turn the 12-acre home of Town & Country Office Park into a 727-unit mix of apartments and townhomes.
The nearly 200,000-square-foot office park would be demolished to make way for the project.
The property sits a block south of the Garden Grove (22) Freeway across the street from the Orange Financial Center office complex and about a quarter-mile east of MainPlace Mall, Orange County’s ninth-largest shopping center by sales.
The area, which straddles Orange and Santa Ana, has become a hotbed of apartment development over the past few years.
Fairfield’s project would be built by 2021 if it gets necessary approvals in a timely fashion, according to city documents. The developer told the city it would take about three years to build.
Residential Mix
The project would include two five-story apartment buildings with a combined 653 units built around seven-story parking structures. A fitness center, club rooms and swimming pools are part of the plans, and a nearly 9,000-square-foot rooftop amenity center would top each parking structure.
Seventy-four for-sale townhomes, including 25 two-bedroom units and 49 three-bedroom units, would be built on the eastern edge of the site. The three-story homes would include two-car garages.
No unit pricing has been announced.
Privately held Fairfield, which says it owns eight rental projects in OC, has shepherded similar projects through the development process here, including its latest, in Irvine near John Wayne Airport. It paid a reported $26 million in 2015 for a 9.1-acre former industrial site on Von Karman Avenue, getting it entitled for rentals and for-sale homes.
It sold the for-sale portion to an affiliate of Seattle-based Intracorp Cos. early last year for an estimated $17.5 million. Townhomes under construction there are now in early sale stages under the C2E, or Close to Everything, banner.
Fairfield still owns the site’s rental portion, the recently opened, 363-unit Rize Irvine complex.
Colton Property
Town & Country Office Park has been owned by Irvine-based Colton Cos. since 1999, according to CoStar Group Inc. records.
Its two-story buildings, built in 1975, total about 198,000 square feet.
Colton Cos. has offloaded multiple area properties in the past few years. Some, including part of the Colton Plaza office campus next to the airport, are in the process of being demolished to make way for apartment complexes and other uses in the next few years.
Busy Area
A few thousand apartment units have been built or proposed in Santa Ana and Orange around the mall in that time.
Several of the projects would be built on or around office sites, some incorporating existing offices, others resulting in demolition.
To the immediate north of Town & Country Office Park in Orange, a 262-unit apartment complex is under construction at 999 W. Town & Country Road next to a four-story, 98,551-square-foot office property. San Diego-based Westcore Properties owns the office site and got the property’s excess land entitled for rentals, selling that part to Toll Brothers Apartment Living early this year.
A few blocks away in Santa Ana, development group AC 2525 Main LLC this year proposed demolishing an 81,000-square-foot office across the street from the Discovery Cube museum to make way for a 517-unit rental project.
By total square footage, Town & Country Office Park appears to be among the largest OC office projects that would be knocked down for apartments since Irvine Co. demolished the 238,000-square-foot San Joaquin Plaza near its Newport Beach headquarters several years ago; the site is now home to the upscale Villas at Fashion Island rentals.
