Orange County’s top commercial real estate developers kept busy last year with a host of retail, hotel and office projects, although the number of buildings nearing the finish line was smaller than the previous few years.
The county’s dozen largest office, industrial, retail and hotel developers completed a little more than 2 million square feet worth of projects here over the 12-month period ending in April, based on this week’s Business Journal list.
That’s down about 50% from the prior year’s list, when 20 developers completed 4 million square feet of good-sized projects around the county, the most development to open here since 2007, when nearly 7.8 million square feet of projects wrapped up.
Timing was everything in terms of what’s represented on this edition of the list.
Nearly 2 million square feet of office space, for example, is wrapping up at three projects in Irvine, but they’re not represented on the ranking because they weren’t completed by the April 30 entries cutoff date.
The nearly 1-million-square-foot campus of Broadcom Ltd.; Trammell Crow Co.’s Boardwalk project near the airport; and Irvine Co.’s 200 Spectrum Center tower will be represented on next year’s list (see speculative-office story, page 16).
Data used to compile the list are from company submissions, CoStar Group Inc. records and Business Journal research.
All of the companies completed a unique project larger than 50,000 square feet during the year.
In addition to ground-up development, the list also includes a handful of developers of creative-reuse projects, primarily for office and retail uses.
Source of New Retail
Retail took center stage in Orange County’s development world over the past year with two notable projects coming on line.
• In Buena Park, M&D Properties opened The Source, a mixed-use project on 12 acres at the intersection of Beach Boulevard and Orangethorpe Avenue near Knott’s Berry Farm. The 400,000-square-foot retail portion is the largest retail project to open in Orange County since 2008. A five-story, 60,000-square-foot office also opened at The Source early this year, and the developer is finishing a 174-room Hilton Hotel there.
The 496,000 square feet of completed retail and office space gave M&D the top spot on the list. This year the developer moved its headquarters from the Los Angeles County city of Lynwood, the site of another one of its projects, to Buena Park.
• No. 7, San Jose-based DJM Capital Partners opened its second notable local retail project in as many years with the Lido Marina Village development in Newport Beach.
The 125,000-square-foot collection of shops and restaurants has a number of buzz-worthy tenants, including famed sushi restaurant Nobu, and closely follows DJM’s Pacific City shopping center, which opened in late 2015 in Huntington Beach.
The largest retail projects now under way in the region are redevelopments: Merlone Geier Partners’ estimated $260 million Five Lagunas project in Laguna Hills, and the redevelopment of the former Macy’s site at the Irvine Spectrum shopping center, an estimated $150 million project headed by Irvine Co. and scheduled to open next summer.
Hotel developers make up most of the list’s entries, with four firms adding close to 655,000 square feet of hotel space to the area over the past year.
• The five-story, 262 room Hyatt House on Harbor Boulevard in Anaheim was the largest hotel by square footage to open last year, giving developer Orange-based Prospera Hotels Inc. the No. 2 spot on the list. Prospera is one of nearly a dozen hotel developers with additional projects in the works in and around the Anaheim Resort District.
• Only one ground-up industrial developer is represented on the list—Newport Beach-based Western Realco, which takes the No. 3 spot, thanks to a single project it finished in Brea last year.
Western Realco has the largest pipeline of industrial space in the works in OC, thanks to its planned redevelopment of the former Beckman Coulter campus in Fullerton, which would add nearly a million square feet of warehouse, manufacturing, office and light-industrial space to the 44-acre site.
The project can’t come soon enough for the area’s base of industrial users. There are only 181,069 square feet of industrial space under construction in OC, the third tightest market for space in the country, according to recent data from the local office of brokerage JLL.
