RESIDENTIAL
City Ventures LLC, a Santa Ana-based builder that began operations earlier this year, has been ramping up work by snatching up small infill lots across the Southland.
At its current pace of growth, the company—founded by land brokerage executive Craig Atkins and Mark Buckland, a former president of Seal Beach-based Olson Co.—might soon find itself among the area’s most active builders in an industry that’s largely been in hibernation for more than a year.
The company now owns more than 450 lots. Its latest deal just closed: a 34-lot property in San Diego’s La Costa, near the Four Seasons Resort.
City Ventures bought the property from Bank of America Corp. for $4 million in cash, said Atkins, the former chairman and co-chief executive of Irvine land brokerage O’Donnell/Atkins.
Much of the distressed lots acquired by City Ventures are being made in all-cash deals because of the difficulty getting affordable loans these days, according to Atkins.
The company has already started construction on 16 homes on the La Costa land. Homes there will run about 3,500 square feet to 4,200 square feet, and asking prices are expected to average about $625,000.
Atkins said the company is on track to complete 70 homes next year and expects to make about $40 million in revenue. For 2011, the company’s projecting 250 home sales and $100 million in revenue.
That’s a sizable amount of building in an industry’s that’s been shrinking in the past year.
In trade publication Builder Magazine’s listing of the largest U.S. homebuilders in 2008, the 100th most active company in the country only built 272 homes. Next year’s list is expected to show a further drop in construction.
Other areas where City Ventures plans to build include Santa Barbara, Scripps Ranch and Yorba Linda.
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Los Angeles-based mutual fund manager Capital Group Cos., which moved its OC operations to a campus in the Irvine Spectrum in 2007, has sold an industrial building it owned in Brea.
Its former local headquarters were based in the city.
A 42,747-square-foot building at 775 Columbia in Brea was sold to OSD Audio, a manufacturer of sound equipment including speakers and amplifiers.
The sales price was not disclosed, although brokers for the Anaheim office of CB Richard Ellis Group Inc. are calling the deal the largest user sale in North County so far this year.
CB Richard Ellis’ Ian Britton, Brad Bierbaum, Brian DeRevere and Ryan Peterson represented both Capital Group and OSD Audio in the transaction.
RREEF Changes
Aliso Viejo offices owned by RREEF Funds LLC, one of the country’s larger real estate investors and managers, are seeing a number of changes.
Last month I wrote about how the property management duties for close to 6 million square feet of Orange County buildings owned by RREEF, a unit of Germany’s Deutsche Bank AG, were set to be outsourced to Houston-based Transwestern.
In addition to property management changes, now RREEF is switching up the brokers who will handle leasing at some of its larger offices in Aliso Viejo. Those offices are part of the Summit Office campus, developed over the years by locally based Parker Properties with its financial partner, RREEF.
Dallas-based Stream Realty Partners LP said it was selected by RREEF to handle leasing for five Summit buildings, totaling about 484,000 square feet of space. Leasing for the buildings had been managed by CB Richard Ellis.
The buildings that Stream is taking over are the five offices south of Aliso Viejo Parkway at the lower part of the campus, at 65, 75, 85, 95 and 101 Enterprise. They’re about 70% full.
Those buildings include the headquarters of Buy.com Inc., American Sporting Goods Corp. and TechSpace Inc., among others. Monthly rents at the offices run about $2.25 per square foot.
Newer buildings at the north end of the campus developed by Parker Properties, including the recently built Pacific Life tower and two buildings that opened in the past two years, are not part of the changes in leasing agents or property management.
The deal is the biggest leasing assignment so far for the local office of Stream Realty, a real estate investment, development and services company that opened up an Irvine office in March, its first in California.
The company’s other big assignment is to sublease space at another Summit office, the 109,948-square-foot headquarters of Valeant Pharmaceuticals International. Space there is being offered at about $1.90 per square foot per month.
Stream Realty’s local office is headed by brothers Blaine and Colby Annett, who are co-managing partners. The company’s hiring locally, the Annetts said.
