The developer of Orange County’s largest industrial project over the past decade has bought another site along the Anaheim-Placentia city line for what’s planned to be a multibuilding industrial project.
Newport Beach-based Panattoni Development Co.—one of the country’s largest privately held industrial developers, with the Anaheim Concourse among its recent projects—has completed the purchase of a 10.2-acre site about a mile north of the Orange (55) and Riverside (91) freeway interchange.
The currently unused site is near the intersection of Miraloma Avenue and Van Buren Street and previously held a strawberry farm.
The infill site is on the edge of the Anaheim Canyon business district and one of the biggest concentration of industrial buildings in North Orange County.
Industrial buildings there, like in most parts of the county today, are largely full—North OC’s base of 105 million square feet of leasable industrial space has less than 3% vacancy, according to a sampling of year-end brokerage data.
Panattoni paid about $17.7 million for the site, or a little under $40 per square foot, according to CoStar Group Inc. estimates.
The purchase includes two connected 5-acre parcels, one of which falls in Anaheim, and the other in Placentia.
Panattoni is plans to build a multibuilding industrial project, although specific details have not been disclosed yet.
Because the property cuts across two cities, a single-building project crossing city lines appears unlikely due to local regulations. Brokerage sources not directly involved in the deal but familiar with the property say a four-building project totaling about 215,000 square feet is planned.
That’s roughly the same amount of industrial space that was under construction in all of OC late last year, according to marketing materials for the property from the Newport Beach office of brokerage Daum Commercial.
A little more than 1.4 million square feet of additional industrial space is being queued up and expected to break ground across the county this year, according to Business Journal data.
The industrial market’s gain of a new project represents another loss of land for OC’s shrinking base of strawberry farms.
The just-sold land had been used “as a strawberry field for several generations with a reputation of the best strawberries in the market,” noted a Daum Commercial marketing flier for the property.
Daum Executive Vice President Chris Migliori represented the sellers, which property records show to be a Placentia-based family trust.
A recent report in farming trade publication The Packer notes that strawberry fields in OC dropped from 1,770 acres in 2004 to 658 acres in 2014.
Much of the remaining farmland used for strawberries is on land owned by Newport Beach-based Irvine Company and Aliso Viejo-based Five Point Communities, and is expected to eventually be replaced by other types of development, the report noted.
Many area farmers have relocated their operations 100 miles north to Oxnard, the report said.
Concourse
Panattoni’s site is roughly a mile from the developer’s last big project in Anaheim, the 80-acre Anaheim Concourse campus, an industrial project it built on land that once served as a Boeing Co. campus.
The development includes a combination of for-sale and for-lease buildings totaling about 1.4 million square feet. The for-sale buildings are now being used by a variety of owner-users.
Panattoni and its financial partner in the project, New York-based Clarion Partners, last year sold a 965,255-square-foot collection of for-lease buildings at Anaheim Concourse for a reported $188 million.
Those largely full buildings were acquired by real estate investment adviser Bentall Kennedy, a Toronto-based company with U.S. operations based in Seattle.
Panattoni’s deal for the former strawberry farm is its second back in Anaheim since that sale.
Late last year it was part of a venture that bought a nearly 7-acre site just off the Santa Ana (5) Freeway on a one-way street that connects Katella Avenue and the Platinum Triangle to Anaheim Boulevard and the Anaheim Resort area.
A 144,008-square-foot facility is planned for the formerly city-owned land at 1710 S. Anaheim Way. Construction is scheduled to start in a few months, and a tenant has already been signed on for the entire building.
Rosendin Electric Inc., one of the country’s largest privately held electrical contracting firms, plans to relocate its Southern California regional headquarters to the building once construction is completed late this year. The employee-owned company currently has local offices in La Palma and Buena Park.
Panattoni bought the South Anaheim Way property in a venture with Batcheller Equities Inc. in Newport Beach.
Batcheller Equities, whose founder, Steve Batcheller, previously ran the OC operations of Panattoni, is not part of the purchase of the former strawberry farm.
