A multibuilding office swap in Newport Beach involving Irvine Company and Burnham USA that I covered this summer includes one more building than first reported.
I wrote about the two Newport Beach-based real estate companies in July—the two largest office owners in the Newport Center—swapping ownership of four offices near the Fashion Island shopping center.
No money changed hands in the deal, which involved Irvine Co. getting a pair of medical offices on San Joaquin Hills Road while Burnham picked up two buildings that were previously part of Irvine Co.’s Corporate Plaza office complex, next to Avocado Avenue.
The deal gave Irvine Co. a bit more flexibility during its construction of the new office tower going up at 520 Newport Center Drive next to its existing headquarters, and it consolidated Burnham’s portfolio of office properties on the western side of Newport Center.
Add another small Newport Beach property that changed hands in the deal: 341 Bayside Drive, a nearly 8,300-square-foot waterfront office about two miles from Newport Center near the intersection of Pacific Coast Highway and Bayside Drive.
The building, previously owned by Burnham, was recently listed on Irvine Co.’s website; company officials confirmed it was part of July’s property exchange with Burnham.
Jeweler Black, Starr & Frost is a tenant of the two-story office next to the 3-Thirty-3 Waterfront restaurant.
Irvine Co. lists the one available suite at 341 Bayside as having monthly rents of $5 per square foot.
Officials for the new landlord note that Irvine Co. owns a few other properties in the vicinity of its new office, including the Balboa Marina.
Irvine Co., factoring in the Bayside building, picked up three offices totaling 48,000 square feet as part of the exchange, while Burnham’s two additions total about 80,000 square feet.
MetroCenter Changes
A second large office complex in Costa Mesa’s arts district has seen a change in leasing strategy.
The owners of MetroCenter at South Coast, a three-building office complex on Anton Boulevard that totals nearly 750,000 square feet, recently brought on the local office of Jones Lang LaSalle to handle leasing.
JLL senior vice presidents Jay Nugent, Andy White and George Thomson will lead the leasing team. The brokerage said the property has immediate availability ranging from 1,000 square feet to more than 45,000 square feet of contiguous space.
An affiliate of San Francisco-based RREEF Funds LLC bought the 17-acre campus in 2005.
The three 12-story towers at the complex are listed as being between 71% and 96% leased, with monthly rents of $2.10 per square foot, according to CoStar Group Inc. data.
Transwestern previously handled leasing for the campus.
Notable tenants at the MetroCenter, just off the San Diego (405) Freeway, include Stearns Lending Inc., Experian and Theodora Oringher PC.
The change at MetroCenter comes a few weeks after C.J. Segerstrom & Sons brought aboard brokerage Cushman & Wakefield Inc. as the exclusive leasing agent for its three high-end Costa Mesa office towers: Plaza Tower, Center Tower and Park Tower.
The three Segerstrom buildings total an additional 1.2 million square feet of office space.
College Construction
The Irvine office of Sundt Construction has broken ground on an educational facility for Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa.
The $38 million project, slated to open in 2015, is a three-story, 78,000-square-foot building that will be the community college’s new math, business and computing complex.
The project, designed in collaboration with the Coast Community College District and Irvine-based architecture firm LPA Inc., will be built to environmentally friendly standards, according to Tempe, Ariz.-based Sundt, which is acting as the district’s construction manager.
The complex will hold two meeting rooms; 15 mathematics lecture classrooms; a 200-station computer lab; 35 administrative offices; nine lecture classrooms for business and computing courses; and several other features, according to Sundt’s website.
