It’s been an active few weeks for Newport Beach-based Stillwater Investment Group, a privately held investor in office, industrial, apartment and retail properties that’s been operating since 2014.
In last week’s edition of the Business Journal, I reported it landed a tenant to take over its largest area investment to date, the three-building former campus of QLogic Corp. in Aliso Viejo.
San Clemente-based Glaukos Corp., a medical device firm with a market valuation of about $2.2 billion, disclosed on Nov. 16 that it had struck a deal to lease the entire campus, which totals about 160,000 square feet and was rebranded as Element when QLogic vacated the site about a year ago.
The 13-year lease starts in May. It’s the largest office lease in Orange County so far this year.
Glaukos said in regulatory filings that it “intends to relocate its corporate administrative headquarters, along with certain laboratory, R&D and warehouse space,” to the Aliso Viejo facility.
It’s keeping “its manufacturing facilities at its San Clemente location for the foreseeable future,” Glaukos said in those filings.
Glaukos is also in talks to buy some developable land next to the existing Aliso Viejo buildings that could hold an additional building running about 40,000 square feet.
Stillwater bought the Element campus in 2016 for $36 million in a venture with the Newport Beach office of CrossHarbor Capital Partners, a frequent collaborator.
The same duo recently struck a deal for another office project near Angel Stadium. They bought Orangewood Corporate Plaza, a two-building complex near the interchange of the Orange (57) Freeway and Orangewood Avenue and a few blocks from the baseball stadium.
The two-story, multitenant buildings are at 2100 and 2200 Orangewood Ave. and total about 107,000 square feet. Stillwater and CrossHarbor paid about $18.6 million in a deal brokered by the Newport Beach investment properties group of CBRE Group Inc., according to Stillwater founder John Drachman.
The offices were sold by Glendale-based PS Business Parks Inc., a real estate investment trust that has unloaded three Orange County properties this year.
In July, I reported on property records indicating a transfer in ownership of the Orangewood campus, with a Scottsdale, Ariz.-based firm specializing in tenant-in-common deals taking title.
The July transaction was in fact a reverse-exchange transfer made by PS Business Parks. It was a short-term deal made to accommodate another forthcoming acquisition for the Glendale firm, according to Drachman, who said his venture bought the Orange property directly from PS Business.
CBRE’s Anthony DeLorenzo, Gary Stache, Doug Mack and David Dowd represented the seller of the Orangewood complex.
$800M and Counting
A pair of local office deals this month brokered by the Newport Beach capital markets team of brokerage firm Newmark Knight Frank has pushed its 2018 deals past the $800 million mark.
In the Irvine Spectrum, the group helped sell Laguna Canyon Plaza, a 51,512-square-foot multitenant office building about a block from the headquarters campus of Blizzard Entertainment Inc.
It’s 88% leased; International Education Corp. is the largest tenant at the property.
The building was bought by Costa Mesa-based Universal Properties and Management Inc. for nearly $16 million, or $309 per square foot. The seller was undisclosed.
Laguna Canyon Plaza was “a rare value-add opportunity with significantly below market rents” in an area where a majority of the buildings are owned by Newport Beach-based Irvine Co., noted Newmark’s Paul Jones, who worked on the deal with colleagues Kevin Shannon, Brunson Howard, Blake Bokosky and Brandon White.
Jones, Shannon, Bokosky and White also worked on this month’s sale of the Offices at Village Business Park, a two-building, 141,387-square-foot office property in Buena Park near the interchange of Knott Avenue and the Santa Ana (5) Freeway.
The complex was 54% leased at the time of the deal. It was sold by San Diego-based Westcore Properties. The buyer was Stanton Road Capital LLC, a Los Angeles-based investment management firm.
A sales price was not immediately disclosed; Westcore paid about $21.5 million for the complex in 2016.
