Optima Tax Relief LLC has renewed and expanded its lease at its Santa Ana headquarters, the Elevate@Harbor office campus along Harbor Boulevard.
The company will take up an entire 77,500-square-foot building at the two-building campus, which totals nearly 198,000 square feet.
It’s among the largest office lease deals signed in Orange County the past few months.
Optima had been in a portion of the other, larger building at the complex. The move next door allows Kearny Real Estate Co., which paid $34.8 million for the complex last year, to market the other 120,000-square-foot building at the campus as a multi- or single-tenant building.
The provider of tax debt relief services has been at the complex since 2012, growing substantially; its initial lease there ran 3,000 square feet.
The company occupies 40,000 additional square feet elsewhere; half of it down the street at 3601 S. Harbor and the rest in Arizona.
The company was formed in 2011, and deals with tax negotiation and settlement, IRS audit defense, and back taxes.
Its new headquarters will house 450 of its total 650 employees.
Kearny, a Los Angeles-based real estate developer and investor, bought the complex last January, a few months after it sold off its largest area property, the former Los Angeles Times printing press property in Costa Mesa known as The Press.
Irvine-based Colton Co. sold the 8-acre Santa Ana campus between MacArthur Boulevard and Segerstrom Avenue in the South Coast Metro West area. The buildings traded for $176 per square foot.
The office, then called Colton Corporate Center, was about 95% leased at the time of sale.
$20M Renovation
Kearny is wrapping a $20 million renovation at the complex, including a new exterior, corridors, bathrooms, elevators and adding amenities like outdoor gathering spaces, a conference center and fitness facility.
The office also has a new event lawn and café.
The redevelopment plans echo Kearny’s former area investment a few blocks away in Costa Mesa.
In 2015, Kearny partnered with Chicago-based Tribune Media Co.—former owner of the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune—to head redevelopment of the former L.A. Times printing plant site.
The project never started, and was later sold to Foster City-based developer and investor SteelWave LLC, which owns the creative office project next door—Hive, home to the Los Angeles Chargers.
The office portion of the 430,000-square-foot Press campus is now in the early stages, and should be ready for delivery to office tenants next year, according to the developers.
