Two buildings in Aliso Viejo that hold the local operations of homebuilder Lennar Corp. and other tenants has traded hands in what looks to be the priciest office sale in South Orange County so far this year.
An affiliate of Invesco Advisers Inc., a Dallas-based institutional investor, recently completed the purchase of 15 and 25 Enterprise, a pair of five-story offices built about 14 years ago at the Summit Office Campus in Aliso Viejo.
The two buildings, which total about 295,000 square feet, run alongside the San Joaquin Hills (73) Toll Road next to Pacific Life Insurance Co.’s office.
The sale included a six-level, roughly 1,150-stall parking structure.
Financial terms of the deal were not immediately disclosed.
CoStar Group Inc. records put the sale’s estimated price at $108.1 million, which works out to more than $360 per square foot for the two offices, not factoring in the parking structure.
There hadn’t been a South County office sale announced this year to top the $50 million mark prior to Invesco’s purchase.
The deal included the assumption of about $40 million in debt, according to property records.
Palo Alto-based Menlo Equities LLC sold the buildings, which it acquired in 2011 for a reported $57.5 million.
The two offices had significant amounts of empty space at the time; now CoStar records put vacancy at the buildings at less than 5%.
Miami-based Lennar Corp., which runs much of its day-to-day operations out of Aliso Viejo under Chief Operating Officer Jonathan Jaffe, is the largest tenant at the two buildings. The homebuilder and its affiliates lease more than 80,000 square feet at 25 Enterprise, according to brokerage data.
One of those affiliates is FivePoint Communities, which is overseeing the development of the residential and commercial areas surrounding the Orange County Great Park in Irvine, along with other large masterplanned developments in the state.
FivePoint last week announced it was in the early stages of plans to take its company public via an initial public offering.
The proposed IPO—details of which have yet to be disclosed in regulatory filings—should allow Lennar and other investors to cash out a portion of their stakes in the Great Park Neighborhoods project and other developments (see related Addendum item, page 13).
Emile Haddad, FivePoint’s chief executive and the former chief investment officer of Lennar, will retain the roles of chairman and chief executive at the company—which will be called Five Point Holdings Inc.—once it goes public.
Other large tenants at the two Aliso Viejo buildings include Metagenics Inc., a maker of vitamins and supplements, and Carrington Holding Co., a lender and real estate services company.
The deal marks one of two large office properties in OC that Menlo Equities is expected to sell this year. The investor also is said to be nearing a deal to sell Quintana, a multibuilding office campus in Irvine that is about 420,000 square feet.
The Aliso Viejo buy is one of the larger nonapartment transactions that Invesco and its affiliates are known to have made in OC in the past few years.
In 2012 it paid an estimated $121 million for Club Laguna, a 421-unit apartment complex in Laguna Beach.
The company this year disclosed paying $187.2 million for an unnamed, 520-unit apartment complex at the Park Place mixed-use campus in Irvine.
That deal appears to be for Vireo, a development headed up Irvine-based Sares-Regis Group, which is now in the early stages of construction along Michelson Drive.
Invesco is one of the investors in Sares-Regis’ multifamily division, along with Switzerland-based UBS AG and Penn Square Real Estate Group in Steamboat Springs, Colo.
