Diamond Baseball Company Inc., a manufacturer of baseball, softball, and football products, is moving its headquarters from Cypress to Santa Ana.
The company—which makes a variety of gloves, balls, bats, protective gear and other sporting-good products under the Diamond Sports name—recently inked a deal to move to 1880 East Saint Andrew Place. The 200,000-square-foot manufacturing building is part of Santa Ana’s PacifiCenter business park.
Diamond Sports will be leasing about 82,000 square feet of the high-profile building, which runs along the Costa Mesa (55) Freeway, between Edinger and Warner avenues.
The lease is one of the bigger industrial transactions signed in Orange County over the past few months and one of the larger recent instances of a local company moving their operations.
Diamond Sports had long been operating out of an 119,000-square-foot industrial building in a business park in Cypress, at 11130 Warland Drive. That building–which served as the company’s corporate offices, worldwide distribution facility and housed its research and development departments–is currently up for lease.
Analysis
Diamond Sports had been evaluating its space options for over a year, said Wes Hunnicutt, a principal with the Irvine office of brokerage Newmark Knight Frank who represented the tenant in the new lease.
“We analyzed (Diamond Sports’) operations and identified areas to garner greater efficiencies,” Hunnicutt said.
That allowed the company, which is estimated to employ more than 30 people in Cypress, to reduce its square footage by about 25%.
Diamond Sports has been in business for more than 30 years, according to the company’s website. In addition to catcher’s gear, helmets and umpire’s gear, the company makes baseballs, softballs, player bat bags, team equipment bags, mitts, gloves and other apparel for both men and women.
Its products are sold at a variety of sporting goods stores.
Warehouse Ceilings
The company’s new space in Santa Ana includes about 8,000 square feet of office space and counts 30-foot warehouse ceilings, among other features. It’s located within Santa Ana’s enterprise zone, which provides tax credits to companies operating there.
Terms of the seven-year lease weren’t disclosed. The Santa Ana building is owned by an affiliate of Boston-based institutional investor AEW Global, according to brokerage data.
AEW Global made waves in OC real estate circles earlier this month by closing on the priciest office sale seen in OC this year, the $108.5 million buy of Irvine’s 2050 Main Street office tower.
State records show an affiliate of AEW taking over ownership of the Santa Ana industrial building in 2006.
The 200,000-square-foot building was built by Santa Ana-based Fabrication Concepts Corp., a sheet metal manufacturer, which uses another part of the building for its operations.
12 Acres
Fabrication Concepts, which operates under the Fabcon name, reportedly paid about $5.5 million to Boeing Corp. in 1998 for 12 acres of land which now houses the 200,000-square-foot facility.
The PacifiCenter business park in Santa Ana also holds the headquarters of Ingram Micro Inc., Abbott Medical Optics Inc. and Powerwave Technologies Inc.
The area has seen one other sizeable real estate transaction in recent months, when Powerwave sold its 367,045 square foot headquarters to a unit of New York-based private equity company Angelo Gordon & Co. for $49.6 million.
Lease Back
Powerwave is leasing back the building from Angelo Gordon under a long-term lease.
Brokers with the local offices of CBRE Group Inc. represented AEW in the Santa Ana lease with Diamond Sports, and also have the listing for the Cypress space being vacated by the company.
Space at the Warland Drive property is being offered at monthly rents of about 59 cents per square foot, according to Sam Chu, first vice president with the Orange office of CBRE.
