The head of Finfare Inc., an up-and-coming fintech in the Spectrum area of Irvine, has made one of the larger office deals of the year in the area around John Wayne Airport.
An entity headed by Finfare Chief Executive Wayne Lin recently completed the purchase of 17900 Von Karman, a 70,964-square-foot office located a block from Main Street along Von Karman Avenue, about a mile from the airport.
The buyer paid $16.9 million, or about $238 per square foot, for the three-story office that’s part of the Main Corporate Center, property records indicate.
It’s the largest office sale in the airport area since January, according to data from real estate market tracker CoStar Group Inc.
The building was empty at the time of the sale.
Los Angeles-based Wilshire Capital Partners sold the property to an owner-user that intends to occupy it shortly after renovations, CBRE Group Inc. officials said last week.
The brokerage, whose Anthony DeLorenzo, Gary Stache, Bryan Johnson, David Dowd and Jennifer Whittington represented the seller in the transaction, didn’t disclose the name of the buyer.
Wilshire Capital paid about $16 million for the office in 2017, records indicate. It subsequently updated the property, which sits across the street from the Irvine Concourse mixed-use complex.
The May 22 purchase represented “a unique opportunity to acquire a Class A low-rise office building in the heart of Orange County’s Greater Airport Area,” DeLorenzo said in a statement.
“The vacant property attracted multiple competitive offers, strong pricing and sold 26 days after opening escrow, which showcases the ongoing strength of the owner-user office market in Southern California.”
Busy Block
Finfare’s headquarters are currently at the new Innovation Office Park campus in the Irvine Spectrum business district; it hasn’t announced plans to move, or how much space at the building it would occupy.
City filings indicate there’s been discussions about turning some of the space at the building into office condos, as well as converting some of the ground floor into medical uses.
The 17900 Von Karman office is next to a site previously eyed for a nine-story, 237,000-square-foot office project. That site at 17850 Von Karman, now used as a parking lot, was sold in May for $7.5 million to a local hotel developer that plans to build a 172-room Home2Suites, city filings indicate.
Another empty parcel on the opposite side of Von Karman Avenue is in line to see a new rehabilitation hospital built for UCI Medical Center.
Launch Near
Founded in 2021, Finfare is building an AI-driven spend management platform and a rewards program to serve North American companies.
The company is a few months away from launching a physical and virtual card-issuing management tool; it showed off the forthcoming products at the Business Journal’s CFO of the Year Awards in May.
It says its expense management platform is designed to help small and medium-sized businesses improve their financial health.
The platform enables employers “to issue physical or virtual charge cards, set custom spend limits, and have purchases auto matched to receipts to eliminate the need for expense reports,” it said.
The company is “in the business of making our payment and digital banking platform fun for everyone,” CEO Lin said last year, at the time the company announced raising $20 million in a seed funding round.
“Managing your money or banking can be fun when it’s simplified and easily accessible,” Lin said. “Getting rewards that generate a greater return from spending, while reducing transaction costs is how Finfare aims to make this experience enjoyable for our users.”
Lin studied at University of California, Irvine and previously served as chief operating officer of Vacaville-based Polaris Pharmaceuticals Inc.
The 2022 seed round was led by investment firm Digital Mobile Venture Ltd.
Digital Mobile Venture is run by Samuel Chen, who made a fortune as one of Zoom’s early investors.
