The owners of the Impac Center office campus in Irvine have filled up the majority of a five-story building built largely for defunct homebuilder John Laing Homes, thanks in part to another local homebuilder that recently moved into the office.
Tri Pointe Homes Inc. recently moved its headquarters from Newport Beach to the Impac Center, an office complex built by Scholle Corp. near Jamboree Road and MacArthur Boulevard that also counts an Equinox Fitness gym and Kimera Restaurant as tenants.
Tri Pointe is leasing about 8,500 square feet at the 19520 Jamboree Road office, according to Chief Executive Doug Bauer.
Bauer, the former president and chief operating officer at William Lyon Homes Inc. in Newport Beach, started Tri Pointe in 2009 with two other Lyon alums, Mike Grubbs and Tom Mitchell.
The company has since grown to about 40 employees and now counts offices in Irvine and Northern California. Tri Pointe has nine housing projects in the works and expects to break ground on a pair of new Orange County projects beginning early next year, according to Bauer.
Tri Pointe’s new home already has some ties to the local homebuilding community.
The 125,000-square-foot 19520 Jamboree building was built in 2008, with John Laing Homes signed on as its first tenant, for about 3.5 floors of the five-story building. But Laing’s early 2009 bankruptcy quickly put a big hole in the building’s occupancy rate.
Much of the vacated space was taken over last year by Irvine-based Edwards Lifesciences Corp., which leased about 51,000 square feet at the building for auxiliary office space. The 19520 Jamboree building now is about 96% leased, making the Impac Center one of the better-occupied multi-tenant office campuses in the John Wayne Airport area, according to brokerage data.
The other two offices at Impac Center, which total about 360,000 square feet, are fully leased, according to data from 360 Commercial Partners in Irvine. Other tenants at the complex include Google Inc., which has its local operations based at the campus.
Cal Quality Lease
Santa Ana-based circuit board maker Cal Quality Electronics Inc. has inked a new lease deal for its headquarters on South Fairview Street.
The company, which ranked as OC’s sixth-largest contract electronics maker last year, based on employee count, renewed its corporate headquarters lease for 57,000 square feet at 2700 S. Fairview St.
The 10-year lease is valued at about $5.5 million, according to brokers with the Irvine office of brokerage Studley Inc. who worked on the deal. That works out to monthly rents of about 80 cents per square foot.
“This was an opportunity for Cal Quality to restructure its existing lease one year early and realize 33% in savings over the life of the transaction,” said Jeff Cannon, corporate managing director for the industrial services group of Studley, who represented Cal Quality along with colleague Paul Jones.
Cal Quality also secured about $1 million in tenant improvements for the building as part of the renewal, according to Cannon.
2700 S. Fairview is a one-story, 116,575-square-foot flex manufacturing building near the intersection of Warner Avenue and Fairview Street that is owned by Barclay Associates LLC.
The rest of the building is leased to Wahlco Inc., an air pollution control systems manufacturer.
Cal Quality employs about 160 people locally, according to Business Journal data. It earned an estimated $31.5 million for the 12-month period ending last June.
Barclay Associates was represented in the transaction by Rick Hertel of Corporate Real Estate Services and Jeff Mitchell of Voit Real Estate Services Inc.
Sky-High Plaudits
Orange County’s two biggest landlords have gotten recent plaudits for skyscrapers they own in Chicago—the city considered to be the birthplace of the skyscraper.
BOMA/Chicago recently had its annual TOBY Awards, highlighting that city’s outstanding buildings of the year.
Newport Beach owners Olen Properties Corp. and Irvine Company walked away with the awards in the two largest office building categories—not bad for an office market counting more than 70 buildings that top 550 feet. OC’s tallest office, in comparison, doesn’t top 300 feet.
Olen’s One South Dearborn, a 40-floor, 828,000-square-foot tower bought by the real estate owner and developer in 2006, won the award for the best building in the 500,000-square-foot to 1-million-square-foot category.
Irvine Co. which bought the 48-story, 1.5-million-square-foot Hyatt Center in late 2010—its first-ever office acquisition outside California—won the award for best building larger than 1 million square feet.
