Chicago-based Equity Residential, one of the country’s largest apartment owners, is eyeing a vacant office site in downtown Anaheim for a new apartment project.
The company, which counts a market value of about $15 billion, is under contract to buy a 25,837-square-foot office building just off Lincoln Avenue, at 200 N. Lemon St.
Equity Residential filed plans with Anaheim last month to build a 225-unit complex at the site, which is a few blocks from City Hall and about 1 mile from the Disneyland Resort.
Assuming the sale is completed, plans call for the project to break ground later next year, according to Dustin Smith, development associate for Equity Residential.
The existing two-story office building would be razed to make way for the midrise apartment complex, according to Smith.
Terms of the pending deal haven’t been disclosed.
The 4.5-acre site has been listed for sale at a little less than $7.3 million, according to brokerage materials from the Anaheim office of CBRE Group Inc.
That works out to a sale price of about $280 per square foot for the building, which was previously used by AT&T, according to city documents.
The development would be one of the larger apartment complexes to go up in Anaheim outside of the Platinum Triangle near Angel Stadium in several years. It would also be one of the few multi-family projects in the area initially envisioned as apartments rather than condominiums.
The last big Anaheim apartment complex to be completed was The Crossing, a 312-unit project built by Irvine-based Sares-Regis Group Inc. near the Anaheim Canyon Metrolink Station. That environmentally friendly development finished construction last summer.
The potential involvement of Equity Residential—the largest publicly traded apartment real estate investment trust in the U.S.—in a new project is the latest sign that Orange County’s apartment market is the hottest sector for area developers these days.
Permits
Through August, building permits for 2,465 new multi-family projects—mostly apartments—had been filed with the county, according to data from the Construction Industry Research Board, a trade group based in Burbank.
That’s more than double compared to year-ago levels, and is a nearly 300% increase in apartment-related building permits from two years ago, according to the board’s data.
The 2,465 permits seen through August were nearly 70% higher than the level of single-family homebuilding permits filed so far this year.
About 64% of the new multi-family building permits filed this year are for projects in Irvine.
$1,500 Average
Equity Residential already owns 11 complexes in Orange County, totaling nearly 3,500 apartments. Those properties average monthly rents of about $1,500, according to the company’s latest annual report.
The company owns nearly 120,000 apartments across the country. It has about another 8,300 apartments in Los Angeles, and some 5,000 apartments in San Diego.
Equity Residential has one existing complex in Anaheim, and two in Irvine, where it also has another development project in the works in the largely commercial area known as the Irvine Business Complex.
Irvine
At Alton Parkway and Millikan Avenue, across the street from the Diamond Jamboree shopping center, the company is planning a 189-unit project on the site of an existing 19,000-square-foot industrial building.
That project is still in the planning process with the city, according to Smith. Tentative plans call for construction to take place late next year, he said.
Urban Terra, an Aliso Viejo-based development consulting firm, is working with Equity Residential on the Anaheim and Irvine projects.
Equity Residential’s Irvine project is one of several apartment complexes proposed of late along a few blocks of each other on the Jamboree Road corridor in Irvine, near John Wayne Airport.
Other Projects
Arlington, Va.-based AvalonBay Com-munities Inc., the second-biggest multi-family housing owner in the country, has a 179-apartment project in the works in Irvine. So does Dallas-based Mill Creek Residential Trust LLC, which plans to build a 156-apartment complex across the street from Equity Residential’s project.
