Anaheim-based mortgage and consumer lender CashCall Inc. has inked one of the largest office leases seen in Orange County this year to accommodate its expanding operations.
The company, which is expected to take in about $600 million in revenue this year, last week signed a lease for 125,208 square feet at City Plaza tower in Orange.
The lease covers seven floors of the 19-story building, at One City Blvd. The tower is near the Garden Grove (22) Freeway, next to The Outlets at Orange shopping center.
CashCall will get its name atop the building, which is owned by Los Angeles-based Hudson Pacific Properties Inc. The company will be the building’s largest tenant when the lease commences later this year.
Terms of the lease weren’t immediately disclosed.
The office expansion is the latest sign of growth for CashCall, which was founded in 2003 by J. Paul Reddam.
The company has grown to be one of the largest mortgage and consumer finance lenders in the U.S. during the past few years. It employs an estimated 1,400 people in OC and also has offices in Las Vegas.
CashCall now operates out of close to 300,000 square feet of space in Central OC, according to Jay Carnahan, president of Irvine-based Orion Property Partners Inc., which represented CashCall in the latest lease. Its headquarters will remain in Anaheim, where it leases nearly another 140,000 square feet of space at the Arena Corporate Center office campus.
The company makes mortgage loans as well as unsecured personal loans that carry higher-than-normal interest rates. Both business lines are strong, with mortgages in particular proving a steady source of new business, Reddam told the Business Journal earlier this year.
“The mortgage business has really probably quadrupled in the last year, because interest rates are so low,” he said.
Reddam created Costa Mesa-based Ditech.com in the 1990s, and sold it to GMAC, since renamed Ally Financial. He’s been in the news more recently for his sporting achievements, when his horse I’ll Have Another was a surprising winner in the Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes this year.
Fills Kondaur Space
CashCall’s growth in Central County offices has helped backfill a sizable amount of space discarded by other financial services-related businesses in the area.
CashCall’s Arena Corporate Center headquarters, at 1600 Douglas Road, had been used as an operations center for a unit of Ameriquest during the boom years of the housing market.
About 87,000 square feet of the space it is taking at City Plaza was previously leased to mortgage investor Kondaur Capital Corp., which had used the building for its own headquarters. Kondaur’s focus was buying what it calls “scratch-and-dent” mortgages—loans that banks want to get off their books because they’re seen as risky investments.
The company initially signed a 120,000-square-foot lease at City Plaza in 2009, set to run through early 2013. Kondaur, however, put a large part of that space on the market for sublease after business slowed.
Complicated Lease
CashCall’s lease was more complicated than most, as it required a three-party agreement between Kondaur, Hudson Pacific and CashCall to be reached concurrently, Orion’s Carnahan said.
“[It] was definitely one of the most challenging given the amount of space, timing and cooperation of three separate parties,” he said.
Hudson Pacific bought City Plaza in 2008 for about $53 million. The latest lease brings the 334,000-square-foot building’s occupancy to about 92%, the landlord said.
