AT&T Inc. is putting its regional headquarters office in downtown Anaheim on the sales block, and the company plans to vacate the high-profile building later this year.
The Dallas-based telecommunications giant is preparing to market for sale its 200 West Center Street Promenade building, a nearly 201,000-square-foot office near Anaheim’s city hall.
The property is one of the larger, and higher-end, offices in downtown Anaheim, an area that includes city administrative buildings, shops, residential lofts, and a training facility for the Anaheim Ducks.
The building has long been a large source of jobs in Anaheim—AT&T was the city’s fifth-largest employer as of 2010, according to city records.
8 Stories
The eight-story building held close to 1,000 employees at its peak, according to Mike Johsz, AT&T’s regional manager for corporate real estate.
Employees on Center Street have been relocating to AT&T’s other Orange County offices in recent months.
The building is expected to be completely vacated later this year, Johsz said.
AT&T is estimated to employ about 3,500 people throughout OC, and it is the county’s largest telecommunications company by employee count.
The move out of the Anaheim office isn’t due to any downsizing on AT&T’s part.
“If we have an asset that we can sell, and move to a cheaper space that we own or lease, (a sale) is something we will consider,” Johsz said.
The telecommunication company is said to be considering similar real estate sales in other markets outside OC.
At least one other facility the company once used in downtown Anaheim has been sold of late—an older, two-story building along Lemon Street that traded hands at the end of 2011 for about $6.6 million. The building now is slated for an apartment redevelopment.
Terms of the proposed sale of the Center Street office haven’t been disclosed. Without a tenant in place, an investor could be willing to pay $20 million or more for the 22-year-old building, or roughly $100 per square foot, according to real estate sources.
That’s well below the estimated replacement cost for the building, which likely would run close to $400 per square foot, factoring in higher-end improvements that have been made to the building over the years, according to sources.
The property could be reconfigured into a multitenant office, which could attract some value-add investors.
The property also could get more interest, and a much higher sale price, as a potential investment by an owner-user looking to turn the building into their own corporate headquarters.
There’s only a handful of higher-end buildings in OC—and not many in the central or northern part of the county—that have anything close to 200,000 square feet of office space available to a single tenant.
Marketing materials from the Irvine office of Cushman & Wakefield Inc., whose capital markets-investment sales team is working on the planned sale, note that the office would be “ideal for a Fortune 500 corporate HQ location.” The building is located about one mile from the Disneyland Resort.
Cash
Officials from the brokerage were unable to comment on the planned sale, which marketing materials show is being offered for sale on an all-cash basis.
Jeff Cole and Ed Hernandez, who are in the Irvine office of Cushman & Wakefield, have the listing for the building, along with brokers in the company’s San Jose office.
