Tokyo-based consumer-electronics company Sharp Electronics Corp. has inked a 32,500-square-foot lease for office space in Santa Ana’s Lakeside Tower, according to brokerage data.
The deal, one of the larger tech-company office leases in recent months, is expected to result in Sharp’s relocating much of its local operations from Huntington Beach to the new location, according to sources.
Terms of the latest lease haven’t been disclosed. Sources familiar with the deal said the lease is believed to run seven years, with month rents starting around $1.70 per square foot and rising to more than $2 per square foot by the end of the lease.
The lease is the largest new deal announced at Lakeside Tower since the 10-story building at 4 Hutton Centre Drive traded hands last year for $37 million.
The 216,364-square-foot building—situated near the San Diego (405) and Costa Mesa (55) freeways in the South Coast Metro office market—now is about 50% leased, according to CoStar Group Inc. data.
The building was about 20% full at the time of its May 2011 sale, which saw an undisclosed Asian real estate investor buy the building from Foster City-based Legacy Partners Commercial Inc.
Stearns Lending
Other tenants at the Lakeside Tower office, part of the Hutton Centre office campus, include mortgage company Stearns Lending Inc., which has its headquarters at the building.
Sharp Electronics also has been part of some notable real estate sales in Orange County recently, outside of its new office lease.
A little more than a year ago, it sold a 493,000-square-foot Huntington Beach industrial building on Bolsa Avenue to Irvine-based LBA Realty for a reported $38 million.
Sharp bought the 24-acre Huntington Beach site in the late 1990s for a reported $10 per square foot and built the property, which housed the company’s solar systems division. That division ran the sales, marketing and engineering of Sharp’s solar energy products in North and South America.
The industrial building included about 93,000 square feet of office space, and Sharp had been occupying about 60,000 square feet of that office space in a short-term lease following the sale to LBA.
The company is expected to relocate office staff from the Bolsa Avenue building to Lakeside Tower. Sharp’s remaining warehouse operations at the Bolsa Avenue building were shifted to the Inland Empire in 2010.
Tech Offices
Sharp’s office lease was disclosed in a high-tech office report released this month by brokerage Jones Lang LaSalle, which lists OC among the country’s top 20 office markets for tech companies.
About 5% of OC’s jobs are tied to the tech market, and about 7% of the area’s office jobs are taken up by high-tech services companies, according to the report.
Tech-related tenants in the area have driven much of the leasing activity in South OC and in the office area around John Wayne Airport since the end of the recession. That’s one reason those areas have outperformed other office markets in OC the past few years, according to the Jones Lang LaSalle report.
Different Market
OC’s tech-related office market is a bit different from those in areas such as the Silicon Valley, the report noted.
“Instead of the Facebooks, Twitters, and LinkedIns of the world, Orange County is home to chipmakers, software publishers, and hardware manufacturers like Emulex, Blizzard Entertainment, and Vizio,” according to the report. “As such, the demand for trendy creative space that has consumed major technology markets like San Francisco, New York, and Seattle has not yet been ignited in Orange County.”
