A 95,732-square-foot manufacturing facility in Anaheim traded last month for $26.8 million, in what is Orange County’s largest owner-user sale in the last five years, according to listing broker Keith Greer of CBRE Group Inc.
Advantage Mailing LLC, a printing and distribution company, paid around $280 per square foot for the property, which is less than a mile from its headquarters and just a few miles off the Orange (57) and Riverside (91) Freeway junction. By comparison, the average asking per-square-foot price for North OC buildings between 70,000 to 99,000 square feet in first quarter was $270, according to data from CBRE.
The acquisition marks an expansion for Advantage, which will be transferring its operations from its Placentia facility, a 65,517-square-foot warehouse it’s leased since 2019, to its newly bought property located at 3140 E. Coronado St. in Anaheim.
Owner-user buyers like Advantage are currently better positioned than investors to snap up real estate.
In 2021 and 2022, “investors would get loans at a 3% interest rate, which has since doubled,” Greer told the Business Journal. High rates have pushed investors “out of the way, allowing owner-users to swoop back into the market.”
The seller of the building is Santa Ana-based circuit board maker TTM Technologies Inc. (Nasdaq: TTMI). The firm, valued at $1.9 billion as of last week, is consolidating its local operations, and is moving to its properties in the Midwest and its Santa Ana facility.
CBRE’s Greer and Ben Seybold negotiated the deal.
Work to Be Done
Advantage expects to wait six to nine months for construction work on 3140 E. Coronado to be completed before moving into the building.
The facility, which was renovated in 2013, needs around $4.8 million—or $50 per square foot—of work done before the company can use it.
“They’re doing a lot of demolition to bring it back to a standard manufacturing building,” Greer said. It was most recently used as a circuit manufacturing hub.
Advantage did not respond to requests for comment.
The 3140 E. Coronado property sold at more than triple the price of its last trade.
While TTM did sell the building, it wasn’t the buyer in 2012 when it was sold for $7.5 million.
Another Anaheim-based circuit board maker, DDi Corp., acquired 3140 E. Coronado more than a decade ago. DDi was bought by St. Louis-based circuit board company, Viasystems Group, for around $282 million in 2014.
The following year, TTM acquired Viasystems for a total transaction value of $927 million, which is how the company inherited the 3140 E. Coronado property.
That deal created one of the world’s largest printed circuit board makers. TTM currently counts about 17,000 employees in the U.S. and China.
Industrial Sales
The transaction market among OC industrial properties is currently faring better than the leasing market, even though there aren’t a lot of buildings available for sale, according to Greer.
The vacancy rate among local industrial buildings has more than doubled year-over-year to 3.2%, according to data by Voit Real Estate Services. From fourth quarter 2023 to first quarter this year, the OC industrial vacancy rate rose from 2.6% to 3.2%.
“While still low historically, repeated increases [in the vacancy rate] signal a recalibration after more than a decade of supply-demand imbalance,” the Voit report noted.
“However, limited supply, especially for sale properties, has prevented any significant price corrections.”
