PRES Cos. is under contract to buy AT&T Inc.’s office in downtown Anaheim, one of several notable purchases in the works for the Irvine-based real estate investor and developer.
The privately held company is nearing the purchase of the 200 Center Street Promenade building, a nearly 201,000-square-foot office near Anaheim’s City Hall.
The eight-story building has long served as the local operations hub for AT&T. It held close to 1,000 AT&T employees at its peak a few years ago, making the telecom giant Anaheim’s fifth-largest employer.
AT&T officials said in January that the company planned to sell the office and relocate employees to other offices in the region in a cost-cutting move similar to what the company has done for other buildings it owns across the country.
The company is estimated to employ about 3,500 people throughout OC and is the county’s largest telecommunications company by employee count.
The sale of the Anaheim building is slated to close by November after all of the AT&T employees have moved out, according to Brad Schroth, president and chief executive of PRES, which also operates under the name Professional Real Estate Services Inc.
Terms of the planned sale have not been disclosed. The building, which was marketed for sale by the Irvine office of Cushman & Wakefield Inc., went to market unpriced.
Schroth said his company is in talks with about half a dozen equity partners to help fund the purchase.
He said the company also is in talks with a variety of users to occupy part or all of the soon-to-be-vacant building, which is about a mile from the Disneyland Resort.
Local colleges and church groups are exploring leasing a sizable portion of the building, as well as more traditional office users.
PRES also is exploring making the ground floor of the office more retail-focused, with shops, restaurants and fitness centers being considered, he said.
“We’re already getting lots of phone calls,” Schroth said.
Ongoing redevelopment in the downtown Anaheim area—home to city administrative buildings, shops, residential lofts, and a training facility for the Anaheim Ducks—is helping drive increased tenant interest, he said.
PRES would explore reselling the Center Street building to an owner-user, but “in a perfect world, our plan is to lease it and hold on to it,” Schroth said.
Boutique Hotels
The AT&T building purchase is one of several deals in the works for PRES, which has been operating “below the radar” the past few years, according to Schroth.
The company’s nearing the purchase of a pair of boutique hotels—one in Coronado near San Diego and another in Sonoma County. It currently owns one hotel, the 130-room Pacific Edge Hotel in Laguna Beach.
Also on tap is a pair of smaller office purchases in Orange and San Francisco, as well as the purchase of a 37-acre land site in Palm Desert that’s expected to be developed into a mixed-use project, according to Schroth.
The company’s also been an opportunistic seller.
In June, PRES sold 4300 Von Karman, a 6,652-square-foot office in Newport Beach across the street from The Pacific Club, for a reported $5.4 million.
The roughly $811-per-square-foot sale price is the highest on record for a fully leased office in Orange County that traded hands for more than $5 million, according to brokerage data.
The building was bought by an Irvine-based private investor with foreign ties and will be used as a dialysis facility for Denver-based DaVita Healthcare Partners Inc., which signed a long-term lease at the property.
PRES had been using the office as its headquarters, but it moved to a nearby office in Irvine following the sale.
A roughly half-acre site PRES owns along Von Karman Avenue, next to the 4300 Von Karman office, is nearing a sale for about $1.5 million to a financial services company, according to Schroth.
He said the buyer plans to build a roughly 12,000-square-foot office at the site.
