The Orange County office of Chicago-based Jones Lang LaSalle Inc. has a new head of brokerage operations and an aggressive growth plan for the next few years.
Jones Lang LaSalle just named Jeffrey Ingham to head up its local brokerage efforts. The company counts about 15 leasing brokers at its Jamboree Center office in Irvine and 100 employees in total in OC.
Ingham, a 14-year veteran at Jones Lang LaSalle, replaces Leland Bruce, who is returning to full-time brokering in the company’s Irvine office. Bruce also is dedicating a larger portion of his time to community work.
The company’s hoping to double the Irvine office’s brokerage revenue during the next two or three years, according to Ingham. Jones Lang LaSalle ranked No. 15 in the Business Journal’s April list of largest OC brokerages, with about $333 million of local sales and leases.
The company’s local operations were boosted last year after it bought one of the country’s largest tenant representation companies: Staubach Co.
With investment sales down, opportunities for growth in the next two years are in leasing and assisting landlords with leasing and strategy, according to Ingham, whose brokerage work has largely focused on tenant representation. Ingham’s clients include Fortune 500 as well as OC companies.
The company’s hoping for an industrywide pickup in business, following a slow summer.
“Right now I don’t sense a huge uplift in momentum, (although) we’ve seen a lot more activity on the consulting side of business,” Ingham said. “A lot of decisions will be made in the next three months.”
Enterprise Update
Valeant Pharmaceuticals International is taking another stab at subleasing all or part of its Aliso Viejo headquarters, tapping a brokerage company new to the OC market.
The drug maker is still looking to find tenants to take space at its 109,948-square-foot headquarters at One Enterprise Drive, which overlooks the San Joaquin Hills (73) Toll Road.
A new set of brokers, from Dallas-based Stream Realty Partners LP, was just tapped to try to sublease the building. Valeant first put space back on the market about a year ago.
Stream Realty, which bills itself as a real estate investment, development and services company, opened up an Irvine office in March—its first location in California. The local office is headed by brothers Blaine and Colby Annett, who are co-managing partners.
Stream Realty has five offices in Texas and another in Atlanta. The company made the move to OC in order to establish a West Coast presence, the Annetts said. A majority of their work is landlord representation, they said.
The company’s not disclosing the rates it’s asking for the building, but the Annetts note they’ll be aggressively marketing the space. Leases at the building would run through the end of 2011.
Last November, I wrote a story about Valeant’s initial efforts to slim down operations at the building, which it moved to about three years ago from Costa Mesa.
Since then, Valeant said that it has exercised an option to end the 10-year lease it signed for the space at the end of 2011, and it took a $3.8 million restructuring charge related to the decision.
The building is owned by San Francisco-based RREEF Funds LLC, a unit of Germany’s Deutsche Bank AG.
Valeant hasn’t disclosed where they’d move their headquarters to if they were able to sublease the entire Aliso Viejo office.
ClubSport Clarification
The headline to a story I wrote on the Renaissance ClubSport Hotel and Fitness Resort in Aliso Viejo has caused some confusion.
In the Sept. 7 issue of the Business Journal, I wrote a story about Pleasanton-based Leisure Sports Inc., one of the owners of the one-year-old project, taking over management of the hotel from Marriott International Inc. The headline to the story suggested that the property was no longer a Marriott property, which is not the case. Marriott acquired rights to the LeisureSports trade name in 2005, and the property still carries the Marriott flag.
Also, despite the management change, the property—which is said to have about $56 million in debt tied to it—is not believed to be in financial distress.
The same claim can’t be made for other local hotels. As of midyear, OC had 14 hotels in financial distress, according to data from Irvine-based hotel consultancy Atlas Hospitality Group.
