Yokohama Tire Corp. has signed a deal to move its U.S. headquarters to Santa Ana in a shift that comes a few months after the company sold its longtime home in Fullerton.
The North American manufacturing and marketing arm of Yokohama Rubber Co. in Tokyo, one of the largest tire makers in the world, recently signed a 57,624-square-foot lease at the 1 MacArthur Place office tower in the South Coast Metro business district.
The 10-year lease was made with Chicago-based Equity Office Management LLC, a unit of New York-based private equity giant Blackstone Group LP.
Blackstone paid $82.5 million last December for the Santa Ana building and an adjoining office tower at 2 MacArthur Place. It’s one of several South Coast Metro office acquisitions for the landlord over the past two years.
Yokohama’s new local offices sit near the junction of the Costa Mesa (55) and San Diego (405) freeways next to the headquarters of Santa Ana-based First American Financial Corp.
The deal is one of the largest new office leases in Orange County in the past quarter and the latest notable real estate move for Yokohama in recent months.
Yokohama announced in July the sale of its nearly 440,000-square-foot industrial facility in Fullerton that had served as its U.S. headquarters, as well as its Western Region Distribution center, for nearly three decades.
A unit of New York-based KTR Capital Partners paid nearly $42.8 million, or about $97 per square foot, for the 601 S. Acacia Ave. building.
KTR plans to renovate the property—one of the largest industrial facilities in North Orange County—into a multitenant building.
“With the vacancy rate for buildings over 200,000 square feet in Orange County at a low 2.3%, this building will see strong demand from tenants,” said Ben Seybold, senior vice president with the Orange office of CBRE Group Inc. who worked on the KTR sale, OC’s largest reported industrial sale of the past six months.
The Fullerton building “has a flexible design and either a single- or two-tenant configuration, which will accommodate an array of tenants,” according to Seybold.
The Business Journal reported on the expected sale of the Fullerton building in May.
Chino
At the time, sources said Yokohama would likely move its entire local operations to a newly built, 659,000-square-foot industrial facility in Chino, about 22 miles away from its longtime home.
Yokohama is moving its distribution center to the Chino building, which was built by Sares-Regis Group in Irvine and is owned by Atlanta-based Invesco Ltd., but will keep its local office jobs at the new Santa Ana property.
The separation of the office and warehouse divisions should increase the company’s efficiencies, according to Seybold, who along with colleague Andrew Morrow worked with Yokohama on the Fullerton sale, Santa Ana office lease, and the Chino industrial lease.
In particular, the Chino facility will more than double the tire maker’s warehouse capacity. The building will be used to distribute passenger car and truck, commercial truck, and off-the-road tires.
The facility “will be the cornerstone of the future of our U.S. distribution network,” said Tom Masuguchi, Yokohama’s chief strategy officer, at the time the Fullerton sale was announced.
The tire company is expected to complete the move to the 16388 Fern Ave. building by late this year under a 15-year lease.
CBRE’s Michael Kendall, Darla Longo and Barbara Emmons also represented Yokohama on the sale of the Fullerton building to KTR. David Consani and Joey Sugar worked on the Chino lease, and Scott Kenny and Garrett Ellis worked on the office lease for the tenant.
Dean Chandler and John Weiner of CBRE represented Equity Office in the office lease.
