By most accounts, Newport Beach’s Irvine Company has been one of the most successful residential developers this year in California.
Close to 800 of the nearly 1,100 new homes put up for sale by the company this year in and around its Woodbury community in northern Irvine have been sold.
More than half of all new home sales in Orange County seen this year were made at Irvine Co. projects going up near El Toro Marine base.
They were built through a combination of traditional home-builder projects, Irvine Co.-backed fee-builder programs and a recently revamped homebuilding company owned by the developer called Irvine Pacific LP.
Irvine Co. spent several years planning the latest batch of homes, but still was caught by surprise by the public’s interest, officials said last week.
“In nine months, we met the sales we were expecting in 18 to 24 months,” said Dan Young, president of Irvine Co.’s community development division, which plans and oversees the building of homes, parks and shopping centers on company land.
“It’s been an absolutely awesome year,” Young said.
It hasn’t been awesome for too many other local residential developers, which are seeing a fraction of the sales levels from just five years ago.
Close to 4,000 single family homes and condominiums were being sold per year in OC at the peak of the last housing boom in 2005. Sales figures have been as high as 10,000 new homes and condos sold in 1997, when some larger master-planned communities were hitting the market. In the 1980s, 15,000 sales per year was the norm.
Last year, the top 20 builders in OC combined to sell fewer than 1,500 homes here, the lowest amount in recent memory.
No New Building
With sales lagging, new projects looking to break ground in the next year or so also are scarce.
Only about 2,000 new home permits have been filed in OC since the start of 2009, according to data from Burbank’s Construction Industry Research Board. That limits the number projects that could break ground in the near-term, with the exception of already-approved projects that were shelved in recent years as the housing market slowed.
While no one’s predicting a return to 1997 sales figures any time soon, a few cities and developers are eyeing an eventual economic upswing. They’re pushing ahead with preparations to ramp up bigger residential and commercial projects around the county.
Such outlooks got a boost from Anaheim’s city council. The council recently approved a plan that roughly doubles the number of apartments and condos that can be built in the Platinum Triangle, and roughly triples the amount of commercial space for the area.
The Platinum Triangle has been billed as a site for a downtown-type mix of apartments, condos, retailers and commercial and office buildings since it took shape as a development concept in 2004.
The recent changes call for nearly 19,000 homes, apartments and condos, 5 million square feet of commercial space, and 14 million square feet of offices in the largely commercial, 825-acre area near Angel Stadium of Anaheim and the Disneyland Resort.
Anaheim’s not planning for those homes or commercial buildings to be built immediately. The approvals are expected to guide developments for the next 20 to 30 years, city officials said.
So far, the bulk of construction in the Platinum Triangle has been apartments, with about 2,000 built in the area to date. Many of those apartments first were envisioned as condos, but converted to rental units as the market softened.
Irvine Co. is now the largest apartment owner in the Platinum Triangle, following last month’s buy of the former Archstone Gateway project on State College Boulevard. The complex, now called The Gateway, counts 884 apartments.
It’s the first Platinum Triangle investment for Irvine Co., and the only apartment complex it owns in Anaheim.
The company also has plans to build homes in Anaheim, although it will take some time before it breaks ground on that project in a different section of the city.
Last month, Irvine Co. signed a development agreement with the city of Anaheim that could bring 2,500 homes to the city’s eastern edge for a project it’s calling Mountain Park.
Anaheim Project
Plans for the development have been in the works for nearly 20 years, and once called for as many as 8,000 homes in the Gypsum Canyon area. That number was scaled back about five years ago when Irvine Co. revised its plans for the site, located near the intersection of the Riverside (91) Freeway and the Foothill (241) Toll Road.
Officials for the developer said Mountain Park—which last month got Anaheim city council approval—still is three to five years away from breaking ground.
Irvine Co.’s Young said last week that figuring out the developer’s projects for next year is still up in the air.
This year’s success at its Woodbury, Woodbury East and Stonegate East communities has the developer re-evaluating its building plans and schedules for 2011.
Young said the company will be spending the rest of the year making “a major assessment of the market” before announcing its next steps.
Potential locations for near-term construction include its new Stonegate community in North Irvine, as well as the Laguna Crossings area in the hills near the Irvine Spectrum. Both areas have seen grading work done in recent months, but no timetable for ground-up construction has been announced to date.
