Industrial, Healthcare, Apartment Projects Sprout in Irvine and Newport Beach
A roughly mile-long corridor stretching along Jamboree Road across the border of Irvine and Newport Beach has seen a flurry of development in recent years.
Those projects include representatives from the real estate market’s highest-performing sectors of late: industrial, multifamily and healthcare.
A snapshot of some of the heavily trafficked streets’ larger projects follows.
Parkhouse Residences: Delivering This Summer, 77% Sold
Shopoff Realty Investments is nearing completion on a 30-unit luxury condo community along Jamboree Road in Newport Beach.
The project, dubbed Parkhouse Residences at Uptown Newport, is 77% pre-sold; 23 of the 30 units have found buyers. Prices for the condos range from $2.1 million to $4.75 million.
The average size of each unit is about 2,500 square feet. Polaris Pacific brokered the deals.
Move-ins for the luxury community begin this summer, according to the Irvine-based developer.
Many of the buyers are locals who sold their larger, OC homes but “still want homeownership, just with a property that’s easier to maintain,” Shopoff Executive Vice President Brian Rupp told the Business Journal during a hard hat tour of the under-construction condo community.
A few of the new owners are employees at the UCI Health Irvine campus, which is less than a mile from the community, also along Jamboree Road. Across five buildings, Parkhouse Residences’ 30 units comprise of half floor condos and two-story penthouses.
Each unit has a private, two-car garage. Elevators also open into each residents’ foyer. All residents have access to the condo complex’s communal pool, hot tub and fitness center.
UCI Health: Joe C. Wen Advanced Care Center Opens
The first portion of UCI Health’s new, $1.3 billion Irvine campus along Jamboree Road opened in late April.
The Joe C. Wen & Family Center for Advanced Care welcomed 500 patients on its first day in operation. The 168,000-square-foot facility, which is part of the largest hospital in Orange County, includes 120 exam rooms and offers pediatric and adult specialty services, officials said.
The center, at 19200 Jamboree Road, cost $221 million to build, $20 million of which came from Wen and his family. Wen is the founder and chief executive of Sakura Paper Inc., a division of multinational conglomerate Formosa Ltd. His donation is one of the largest gifted to UCI, according to officials.
The facility’s first two floors offer hubs for children’s care, including the Center for Autism & Neurodevelopmental Disorders. The third floor houses specialists in cardiology, endocrinology and gastroenterology, among others.
The completion of UCI Health’s first portion has kicked off the project’s second phase: the Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center and Ambulatory Care building.
That care center is projected to open in July.
“Together, the Wen and cancer centers will foster research efforts—the foundation of an academic health system—giving patients access to the latest, most promising new therapies unavailable elsewhere,” officials said.
The last phase of UCI Health’s Irvine campus, which will deliver next year, is a 144-bed acute care hospital with a 24-hour emergency department.
Irvine Commerce Center: New Industrial Site in the Market for a Tenant
Irvine Commerce Center, a 137,000-square-foot industrial building along Jamboree Road, was completed earlier this year.
The project, at 18582 Teller Ave., sits about a block from the San Diego (405) Freeway and about a mile from John Wayne Airport.
The newly built property, owned by Los Angeles-based investment manager Ares Management Corp., has yet to find a tenant. It was part of the 71% of incoming Orange County industrial supply that hasn’t been pre-leased prior to delivery, according to data by JLL.
The share of pre-leased properties, 29%, has fallen from the year prior, when over 90% of new projects delivered in the first quarter of last year were pre-leased, JLL officials said.
The decline comes as demand for leasing in the OC industrial sector softens after the sector peaked from 2022 to 2023.
“Vacancy rates hit an all-time low in fourth quarter 2022 at 0.7% and continued to slowly rise since then,” according to a report by CBRE Group Inc.
The vacancy rate among OC industrial properties in the first quarter was 1.5%, up from 1.2% in the fourth quarter 2023.
Even though demand has modestly softened, the local industrial market remains strong.
“The 1.5% vacancy rate was still low compared to the 15-year average above 2%,” according to CBRE.
Irvine Commerce Center signals a return to type for the Teller Avenue site, which previously held low-rise warehouse space and was demolished over a decade ago to make way for a different office project headed by the local office of Hines.
That project never moved ahead on account of the Great Recession, leaving the lot vacant for years, under different ownership groups.
Another project on that lot that never came to fruition was an ambitious mixed-use hospital development called Banc Hotel, headed by then-owner HJ Capital Group in Irvine.
The proposal included a 258-room hotel, some 166,000 square feet of office and medical office space, a food hall and a separate multi-level parking structure.
The hotel was billed as a potential five-star established hotel, the city’s first.
The pandemic, however, put in doubt the viability of many of its proposed uses, and the developers later were in default on their loan for the property, with a balance of some $36.9 million.
