Sacramento’s Panattoni Development Co. is set to be on the lookout for commercial real estate deals in the area after entering into a big venture with the California State Teachers’ Retirement System.
CalSTRS, the country’s second-largest public pension fund, said earlier this month it had joined forces with Panattoni in a nearly $1.2 billion partnership to buy industrial buildings.
The venture—called PanCal—also could seek to do build-to-suit projects and buy and renovate distressed buildings in the U.S. and Canada.
CalSTRS owns about 94% of the venture, with Panattoni owning the rest.
The pension fund, which handles retirement accounts for public school educators, is putting money into the venture. Panattoni is contributing buildings it already owns.
Executives at Panattoni said they plan to focus on deals in Orange County as part of a regional focus.
“We expect to be active in Southern California,” said Stephen Batcheller, a partner in Panattoni’s Irvine office.
The venture reworked the finances of a number of Panattoni’s projects, including one it owns in Lake Forest, in order to raise money for deals.
It’s been a busy few months for Panattoni. Last week, I wrote about the developer landing a new tenant—Panasonic Corporation of North America—to take over a 300,000-square-foot industrial building it owns in Anaheim.
Panasonic’s local distribution space had been based in Cypress. It sold its buildings there a few years ago and moved to Santa Fe Springs.
Coincidently, Batcheller helped Panasonic in the 2006 sale of its Cypress buildings while he was a broker for the local offices of CB Richard Ellis Group Inc.
Panattoni also is selling a pair of Anaheim buildings totaling about 400,000 square feet to Fullerton’s Eastside Christian Church. The church, one of the county’s fastest growing, is eyeing the site as a new campus. That deal’s yet to close.
The company also is close to signing deals for another pair of Anaheim buildings it owns on Miraloma Avenue, Batcheller said.
LBA Buy
Irvine’s LBA Realty has been making a bigger push into industrial buildings of late.
The investor, best known for its buy of office and retail portions of the Park Place campus in Irvine during the past two years, has added another local industrial building to its portfolio.
The company recently bought a 155,495-square-foot warehouse and distribution facility in Cypress that has been home to consumer electronics company JVC Americas Corp., according to brokers at the Irvine office of Cushman & Wakefield Inc., which worked on the deal.
JVC, part of Japan’s JVC Kenwood Holdings Inc., runs a factory service center for its digital storage systems division and has a sales team based at the building, just off Cerritos Avenue. The company, which sold the property, is expected move out of the building in the next year.
The two-story building, which includes about 30,000 square feet of office space, has been marketed as a potential corporate headquarters facility for other tenants.
Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. Assuming a price of $110 per square foot—the average sale price for a local industrial building these days—would put the likely sale price in the neighborhood of $17 million. That would make it one of the larger industrial sales here in the last few months.
Cushman’s Jeff Chiate and Rick Ellison, executive directors at the brokerage, represented the seller in the deal. LBA represented itself.
It’s the largest reported industrial deal in the county that LBA’s recently been involved in, but appears to be far from the company’s biggest deal during the past year.
In October, I wrote about Irvine-based developer Pacific Newport Properties Inc. selling a 1.6 million-square-foot warehouse and distribution facility in the Inland Empire for $85.3 million.
The deal, for three buildings in the Mira Loma Distribution Center, was reported at the time to be the priciest industrial sale in Southern California of the year, although the buyer was not disclosed.
Sources at the time pointed to LBA as the likely buyer, but the press-shy company wouldn’t confirm that.
The rumor appears to be true—LBA’s now marketing the three-building distribution center on its website.
Hotel Hires
The Newport Beach office CB Richard Ellis Group said it’s looking to bolster its hotel practice in Southern California, after hiring one of the region’s top hotel teams.
The company said this month that it’s added Rod Apodaca and Bob Kaplan as senior vice presidents. Both previously were senior managing directors at Colliers PKF Consulting USA, part of Colliers International.
Combined, Apodaca and Kaplan have worked on hotel deals worth more than $1 billion in their careers, including last month’s sale of the 160-room Hollywood Heights Hotel.
They’ll be part of CBRE Hotels, which provides sales advisory, finance, market research and valuation services for hotel investors and owners.
