Newport Coast executive Joe Wen has made his largest bet to date on Southern California’s high-rise office market, snapping up a skyscraper in downtown San Diego that’s the city’s second-tallest building.
Wen, a real estate investor who owns multinational conglomerate Formosa Ltd., recently closed on the purchase of Symphony Towers, a 34-story tower in the city’s Financial District that serves as the home to the San Diego Symphony.
The deal marks the first reported real estate investment in San Diego for Wen, who has also bought a pair of high-rise offices in Orange County the past two years.
Terms of the deal, made with Newport Beach’s Irvine Co., weren’t immediately disclosed.
Property records indicate the nearly 546,000-square-foot tower traded hands for about $45.7 million, or just below $84 per square foot. Such a price represents a fraction of the high-end building’s pre-pandemic value.
Irvine Co. bought Symphony Towers in 2003 for a reported $134 million.
“This acquisition provides an extraordinary opportunity for us to establish a foothold in one of San Diego’s premier office locations,” Wen said in a statement.
“This is one of the most dynamic buildings in the market and is poised for continued success with the much-anticipated reopening of the San Diego Symphony later this year.”
The symphony recently completed a $125 million renovation of Copley Symphony Hall within Symphony Towers. A grand opening for the hall is scheduled for later this month.
The deal is among the only large office sales in San Diego to date, according to brokers that worked on the transaction.
High-Rise Discounts
The San Diego purchase pushed Wen’s investments in SoCal high-rise office markets past the $110 million mark since the start of 2023.
A year ago, Formosa Ltd. paid a reported $42 million, about $107 per square foot for One Pacific Plaza, a nearly 400,000-square-foot office campus along the San Diego (405) freeway in Huntington Beach, next to the Bella Terra shopping center.
The Surf City complex previously was valued at over $300 per square foot.
Earlier in 2023, Wen paid $25 million for 4 Hutton Centre, a 217,000-square-foot office tower that’s part of the 46-acre Hutton Centre mixed-use complex at the corner of MacArthur Boulevard and the Costa Mesa (55) Freeway.
That deal marked a 54% discount to the 10-story building’s prior sale in 2019.
Dallas-based Lincoln Property Co. was hired to manage the Symphony Towers property. The firm, with local offices in Newport Beach, has also taken over management of One Pacific Plaza.
UCI Donor
Wen immigrated to the U.S. from Taiwan as a teen and made his fortune through Formosa Ltd., a multinational conglomerate based overseas but with several local commercial real estate holdings.
Wen is also the founder and chief executive of Sakura Paper Inc., a Cypress-based division of Formosa that makes and distributes a range of sustainable paper products.
Along with the paper business and real estate, Formosa says it is involved in venture capital and financial lending.
Wen, who owns the largest home in Orange County, the 55,000-square-foot Villa de Formosa in Newport Coast, has also made waves in local the philanthropic world of late.
In 2022, he gifted $20 million to UCI Health – Irvine for a new outpatient clinical facility that will bear his and his family’s name. The gift was said at the time to be the largest donation to UCI Health by a donor under age 50.
He also donated $50 million to UC Irvine earlier this year, with the money allocated to create a new School of Population and Public Health. That gift was said to be the largest gift to UCI by a donor under age 50 and marked the first naming gift to the University of California by a Taiwanese American.
Rare Sale
Formosa Ltd. was represented by Chet Cramin of Musick, Peeler & Garrett LLP in the purchase of Symphony Towers.
The Irvine Co. was represented by Adam Edwards, Justin Shepherd and Bailey Bland of Eastdil Secured.
The Newport Beach landlord is the largest owner of offices in San Diego and counts five other towers in the city’s downtown, along with holdings elsewhere in the county. It has no reported plans to sell its other buildings in San Diego, and notes that its extensive office portfolio counts occupancy rates over 90%; see the Sept. 2 print edition of the Business Journal for more.
“We are actively planning to reinvest in the greater San Diego metropolitan area and anticipate growth for the foreseeable future,” Irvine Co. said in a statement last week.
