It’s no secret that Newport Beach-based Irvine Company is Orange County’s dominant office landlord, both in terms of the size of its office portfolio and the quality and location of its buildings.
Figuring out who’s No. 2 is a bit trickier.
A recent market report from Irvine-based brokerage 360 Commercial Partners gives some insight on other owners of larger, high-end office properties across much of the county.
The brokerage’s OC Office Skyline Report surveyed close to 240 of the larger, high-end offices for rent in North OC, Central OC, the Irvine Spectrum, South Coast Metro and the John Wayne Airport office markets.
Those five areas combined for more than 33 million square feet of leasable space.
Irvine Co. is far and away the largest owner represented in the report.
By the Business Journal’s tabulation of the data, the landlord owns more than 8 million square feet of the buildings in the markets covered by the report, taking up nearly a quarter of the total inventory. It’s portfolio in those markets is roughly equal to the combined totals of the next eight largest landlords.
Besides Irvine Co., there are just three other office owners with high-end office portfolios in excess of 1 million square feet. All told, there are 16 landlords with portfolios that exceed half a million square feet, according to data culled from the report.
With a portfolio totaling close to 2 million square feet, Irvine-based LBA Realty now can lay claim to the title of OC’s second-largest landlord, based on the buildings listed in 360 Commercial’s report.
A bulk of LBA’s local office holdings were bought during the recent downturn in a pair of purchases at Irvine’s Park Place campus, where it picked up than 1.5 million square feet of space.
Disk drive maker Western Digital moved its headquarters to LBA’s multi-building campus last year, and now leases close to 470,000 square feet there (see related story, page 1).
LBA’s portion of the 105-acre Park Place campus, which also includes retail space, is undergoing a renovation with an estimated value of about $40 million, according to Andrew White, director of office leasing for 360 Commercial. There’s also talk of the landlord adding a 40,000 square foot gym to the campus.
Olen Update
Newport Beach-based Olen Properties is the third-largest owner of high-end space surveyed in the report, with a little more than 1.2 million square feet of offices.
The reported listed 10 buildings owned by Olen, which edged out Costa Mesa-based C.J. Segerstrom & Sons, the dominant landlord in the high-end office market around South Coast Plaza, by a few thousand square feet for the No. 3 spot.
More than half of Olen’s high-end space is in Brea, where the company is the city’s largest landlord, thanks to its multi-building Olen Pointe Brea office park. The rest is in Irvine.
Olen’s total OC office holdings includes dozens of smaller and older business parks that likely exceed a million square feet of space but weren’t included in the report.
MPG Shrinks
After Olen, Los Angeles-based MPG Office Trust Inc. is Brea’s second largest office landlord. About three-quarters of the company’s 650,000-square-foot OC portfolio is in Brea, according to the 360 Commercial report.
It’s been a steep countywide drop for MPG, which previously operated under the Maguire Properties Inc. name.
In 2007, following a $2.9 billion buy of Orange County and Los Angeles office buildings that were formerly run by Equity Office Properties Trust, Maguire’s OC portfolio briefly topped the 9 million square foot mark, making it the clear No. 2 landlord behind the Irvine Co.
MPG and its predecessor has sold off, or had lenders take back, a majority of those buildings.
Palo Alto-based Menlo Equities Inc. (560,000 square feet of space cited in the report), Dallas-based Lincoln Property Co. (545,000 square feet), Emmes Group of Cos. in New York (945,000 square feet), and San Francisco-based Shorenstein Realty (580,000 square feet) are among several of the top 16 landlords in the report that owe much of their local portfolio to Maguire’s debt-driven downsizing.
A few more sales of former Maguire buildings in Central County could help boost other landlords’ local profiles.
Receivership
There are three larger buildings in receivership in Central OC, including the 21-story City Tower building in Orange, according to the 360 Commercial Report. The three buildings total a little more than 950,000 square feet—about a half million square feet more than the for-lease holdings of any of the largest high-end office owners in Central County.
The report doesn’t cover all of Orange County. The upscale office market surrounding Fashion Island in Newport Beach —largely owned by Irvine Co—isn’t included. Nor is University Research Park, where the Irvine Co. built a multi-building office campus for Broadcom Corp. among other properties it owns there.
Also left out of the report are the mid-or low-rise offices south of Irvine, an area that includes many large office owners in Aliso Viejo, including locally-based Shea Properties Inc. and RREEF Funds LLC in San Francisco, among others.
Huntington Beach is also left out of the report. Last month’s deal for the 429,000 square foot Bella Terra Towers there would likely vault Dallas-based Lincoln Proper-ty Co.’s local office holdings close to 1 million square feet.
