A recently redeveloped industrial building in Tustin that’s home to the first Taps Brewery location has traded hands—for nearly twice the price that it went for four years ago.
The property at 15501 Red Hill Avenue sold earlier this month for $15.5 million, or about $352 per square foot.
The 44,123-square-foot building is at the intersection of Red Hill and Valencia Avenue, across the street from the Orange County Rescue Mission, in the Tustin Legacy development.
It’s one of seven properties left in the portfolio of Irvine-based Kelemen-Caamano Investments, a creative office redevelopment firm shedding its collection of buildings as its founders branch into separate real estate businesses.
KCI, formed in 2015 by Tibor Kelemen and Rudy Caamano, bought the building in 2015 for $8.6 million. After initially planning another office-focused project, KCI switched gears and invested several million dollars to renovate the building in 2016 and bring in mixed-use tenants.
The dedicated brewery is an offshoot of restaurant chain Taps Fish House & Brewery, which has a location a few miles away at the Market Place shopping center. It signed a lease last year for a nearly 20,000-square-foot tasting room, while coffee machine manufacturer Shaerer USA takes an additional 13,000 square feet.
The tenants have long-term leases ranging from seven to 10 years, according to Caamano, who now heads Wind Water Real Estate, an Irvine-based brokerage that represented both buyer and seller in the transaction.
The buyer is a new venture headed by two local, undisclosed investors based in Irvine and Tustin.
“The property was originally an industrial building, and it is now a stabilized investment opportunity with really great, unique tenants,” Caamano told the Business Journal.
KCI once owned 12 buildings, including nearby properties owned or used by Irvine-based Edwards Lifesciences Corp.—whose headquarters are a few blocks away on Red Hill Ave.—and Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Kelemen formed his own investment firm, Kelemen Co., last year, and sold Wind Water to Caamano.
Kelemen Co.’s first area purchase was the Atrium office complex in Irvine, a pair of connected 10-story buildings on Von Karman Avenue. It paid $106.8 million, or $352 per square foot, for that property last year. Upgrades are planned.
Brokerage Revamps Local Ops
Colliers is bulking up its Southern California brokerage operations, with officials in its Orange County office taking a key role in the changes.
One change is for Robert Caudill, a regional managing director who oversees the company’s Irvine brokerage, was recently promoted, and now has two new branches under his purview: the Inland Empire office in Ontario, and a City of Industry operation in east Los Angeles County.
Caudill said he plans to introduce multi-family and retail service lines to the two offices, which currently focus on industrial.
“The connection between the Inland Empire and Orange County is really strong, so it made sense to bring those offices together,” Caudill said.
He is “aggressively recruiting” to hire about 15 more brokers for the two offices, bringing the total to 55.
Another regional promotion is for James Malone, an executive managing director previously based in El Segundo. He is relocating to Colliers’ regional flagship office in LA where he will oversee seven offices in the area.
Executive Managing Director Cody Cannon, who joined the firm at the beginning of the year to oversee Southern California operations, said the changes allow the firm to grow “in a region that has the densest population and highest concentration of offices of any other Colliers region in the nation.”
Cannon, also based in Irvine, and Caudill are spearheading expansion efforts for the OC office, which handled about $3.6 billion in transactions last year.
Colliers’ former National President of Brokerage Services, Martin Pupil, left the firm’s Irvine office last year to take the Executive Managing Director position at Stream Realty, also in Irvine.
