The University of California-Irvine is pursuing plans to add another big batch of student housing to its campus.
The school wants to build apartments and support facilities to accommodate about 2,300 students on 13.3 acres near the intersection of Campus Drive and California Avenue, according to city filings.
It’s a step up in density from other nearby student housing projects.
The project would go up next to a 3,000-bed student housing project at UCI built in 2006 on about 60 acres.
Specific details on the new project’s design hadn’t been disclosed and will require city approval.
UCI has a maximum bed count of 17,637 under a 2007 long-range city development plan, with the goal of half of its students living on campus.
The new project would raise the total bed count to 16,341, according to city filings.
Mining for Homes
Irvine-based Shopoff Realty Investments, a real estate investor and developer that’s no stranger to deals involving complex entitlement work, has its eyes on a soon-to-be closed mining site in New Jersey for a potential redevelopment project.
The company is under contract to buy Millington Quarry, a 180-acre site about 30 miles west of New York that’s long been used for mining operations.
Work at the mine is winding down, and Somerset County’s Bernards Township is looking into potential reuses of the site, which is now zoned for industrial use but could be converted to allow home construction.
One plan calls “for the mining pit to gradually fill up with rainwater and become a privately owned lake, with about 40 homes to be built to the south,” according to local news reports.
Shopoff officials are also exploring whether the township would work with them to allow a variety of additional uses, including retail.
Entitlement work is still in preliminary stages. The developer held early-stage meetings with local residents last month to discuss the project.
Shopoff would buy the site from Millington Quarry Inc. under a deal announced last year. A sales price hadn’t been disclosed.
The project’s one of several challenging ones on Shopoff’s drawing board. Closer to home, it wants to turn a 29-acre former oil storage facility on Pacific Coast Highway in Huntington Beach into a mixed-use project of homes, a hotel and possibly other commercial uses. The company paid $26.5 million for the land last year.
This year it closed on a 21-acre industrial site in downtown Anaheim where it plans to build a development of more than 500 homes, townhomes and apartments.
It’s also in the early stages of construction work on Uptown Newport, a mixed-use residential project on Jamboree Road in Newport Beach.
Vegas Bound
Irvine-based Koll Co. has headed to the suburbs of Las Vegas to buy a sizeable mixed-use project in its second big purchase in nine months.
The privately held real estate developer recently completed the purchase of The Gramercy, two offices in southwest Vegas that include some retail and total about 187,000 square feet.
Koll partnered with Estein USA of Orlando, Fla., to buy the buildings in a deal valued at about $61.8 million, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, which first reported the deal.
The sellers were Las Vegas-based WGH Partners and Krausz Cos. in San Francisco, which paid about $20 million in 2013 for the then-distressed property, according to local news reports.
The project’s now largely full, with office tenants including CalAtlantic Homes in Irvine.
The deal follows last summer’s $74.8 million purchase of a 1-million-square-foot logistics and distribution center in Phoenix in Koll’s largest purchase in about five years.
The southwest suburbs of Las Vegas have been among the city’s fastest-growing areas in the past few years. Other OC investors that have recently made deals there include Irvine-based apartments owner Bascom Group and Newport Beach-based industrial developer Panattoni Development Corp.
