Irvine Company has found a tenant for one of its largest empty blocks of office space in the area around John Wayne Airport.
Pacific Union Financial LLC, an Irving, Texas-based mortgage company, recently signed a lease to occupy all of 675 Anton Blvd., a five-story office in Costa Mesa that’s part of the Newport Beach-based landlord’s Pacific Arts Plaza office complex.
The 65,000-square-foot lease is one of the largest office deals in recent months, according to a new report by the Irvine office of brokerage Savills Studley.
Pacific Union is taking over space vacated by Costa Mesa-based debt settlement services company Morgan Drexen Inc., which shut down operations in June after it ran afoul of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
The agency filed a lawsuit in 2013 alleging that Morgan Drexen—which said it provided “back-office paralegal and paraprofessional services” to law firms—charged illegal upfront fees and made false claims to consumers.
A federal court affirmed the bureau’s charges in June and ordered the company to stop collecting money for debt settlement work. Morgan Drexen then shuttered operations and filed for bankruptcy.
Pacific Union will consolidate operations from other area offices to the Pacific Arts Plaza building, which sits a short walk from South Coast Plaza just off the San Diego (405) Freeway.
“They were looking for a building that would give them more visibility,” said Steve Case, executive vice president for Irvine Co.’s office division.
Terms of the lease were undisclosed. Space at the building had been listed at monthly rents of about $2.95 per square foot, according to brokerage data.
The Pacific Union lease boosts 786,000-square-foot Pacific Arts Plaza’s occupancy to nearly 99%, according to Case.
That outpaces Costa Mesa’s office market as a whole, which totaled about 7.3 million square feet, about 11% of which was vacant at the end of September, according to data from Voit Real Estate Services.
Nearly all of the 150,000 square feet at Pacific Arts Plaza vacated last year by Hyundai Motor America has been filled, primarily by small and midsize tenants such as Brookfield Residential, McGraw Hill Financial, and Ingram Micro Inc., Case said.
Hyundai had leased space at the complex’ 15-story 3200 Park Center Drive building under a short-term deal while its new headquarters in Fountain Valley were under construction.
Irvine Company bought Pacific Arts Plaza in 2010 for a reported $213 million and put in millions more to renovate the 18-acre campus. It’s the only office property that Orange County’s dominant landlord owns in Costa Mesa.
The Pacific Union lease adds to a string of large Irvine Co. leases completed in the past few weeks.
Bank of America Merrill Lynch signed a deal for five floors at the landlord’s new 520 Newport Center office tower next to Fashion Island in October.
The 88,000-square-foot deal is the largest office lease in Orange County in the past six months, not counting renewals, according to brokerage data.
Irvine Company also scored a big renewal last week, completing a deal to keep Australia-based Billabong International Ltd. in its Spectrum-area buildings, which total about 270,000 square feet, according to Case.
