The upscale, 80,000-SF RH Newport Beach furniture gallery set to open soon at Fashion Island could have a new base of nearby customers in the coming years, if a residential development plan in Newport Center moves ahead.
Irvine Co., owner of the luxe shopping center and many of the surrounding offices at Newport Center, recently closed on the purchase of 100 Newport Center Dr., a roughly 17,400-SF building on the southern edge of OC’s priciest office market.
The office building, the onetime home of the Newport Sports Museum but currently vacant, sold for nearly $36.5M, according to property records.
That works out to nearly $2,100 per square foot. On a PSF basis, it’s the most ever paid for an OC office larger than 15,000 SF, according to CoStar records.
High-end offices in OC rarely trade for more than $400 PSF; the new Irvine base of China-backed telecom co. TP-Link sold for about $258 PSF, the most paid on a PSF basis for a large-sized office this year.
100 Newport Center Dr. is located next to Irvine Co.’s low-rise Gateway Plaza office complex. It was sold by Iridium Property Investments, a local family office that reports owning more than $100M in SoCal properties. A redevelopment of the nearly 50-year-old building into a new office had been proposed by the prior owners but never moved ahead.
Irvine Co. doesn’t appear to be looking to expand Gateway Plaza through its recent office purchase. Newport Beach city filings indicate that Irvine Co. recently filed a preliminary application for residential development at the site of the low-rise office park.
A timeline for the proposed project hasn’t been given. Irvine Co. officials said that the proposal is still in the very early stages, with more details expected in a few months.
“We have recaptured some of our previously owned office properties and will include them in our planning,” the company said in a statement last week.
Gateway Plaza sits next to a car wash at Newport Center whose land was eyed for a luxury condo project a few years ago. That development, which faced a fair amount of backlash from locals at the time, never moved ahead. Newport Beach, like other OC cities, is now looking to add more housing, with older offices as a prime candidate for redevelopment.
Tech goods distributor Ingram Micro remains on track to launch OC’s largest initial public offering in several years, though the size of the IPO isn’t as large as previously expected.
When the Irvine-based co., now owned by LA’s Platinum Equity, first raised plans to return to the public markets, a potential valuation in the $10B range was floated.
SEC filings last week placed Ingram’s likely valuation closer to $5B. Tom Gores’ Platinum Equity bought Ingram Micro in 2021 in a $7.2B deal. It will retain a nearly 90% stake after the IPO, which is expected to bring in proceeds around $450M, according to filings.
Ingram previously went public in 1996 but was taken private in 2016 by China’s HNA Group for $6B.
