The county’s 16 most active commercial developers reported about 3 million square feet of completed projects for the 12 months ending in April, more than twice the amount seen the year prior, according to this week’s Business Journal Commercial Developers list.
While plenty of names on the list are well-known institutions in Orange County, including Irvine Co., Shea Properties, and Rancho Mission Viejo LLC, 10 entries on the list weren’t included in last year’s iteration.
Notably, nearly a third of the entries are hospitality-focused developers, who wrapped up projects in the area amid one of the toughest times in recent history for the hotel sector.
Newport Beach’s Irvine Co., the area’s most active developer the past decade, took top marks on the list, delivering nearly 660,000 square feet of new office product in 2020, including the second phase of the firm’s Spectrum Terrace office project and the first phase of a new low-rise office campus, Innovation Office Park.
Industrial on Tap
Outside of Aliso Viejo’s Shea Properties, whose Shea Business Center in Santa Ana is the largest new airport-area industrial project in years, giving the company the No. 2 spot, the industrial sector is largely unrepresented on the list.
That shouldn’t be the case next year, with north of 2 million square feet of new warehouse and manufacturing space on the books for the county.
This includes the largest project currently underway in OC: Goodman Group’s 1.5 million-square-foot logistics campus at the former Kimberly-Clark tissue paper manufacturing site in Fullerton.
Construction began last month and is expected to be completed by spring 2022.
Newport Beach’s Sares Regis Group is developing its Huntington Gateway Park; the first 260,000-square-foot phase was recently pre-leased by Amazon, still the top industrial player in the region.
Office to Industrial
With undeveloped land in short supply, builders of warehouses and distribution facilities have increasingly tapped underutilized retail properties and older business parks for their projects.
In a recent notable example, Newport Beach-based industrial developer Western Realco and Denver-based Black Creek Group are heading the redevelopment of multiple office buildings in Lake Forest that have held a bulk of the local operations of Panasonic Avionics for close to a decade.
Plans have been filed to tear down five offices in and around the city’s Pacific Commercentre building park spanning about 370,000 square feet. They would be replaced with three industrial buildings totaling nearly 380,000 square feet, according to city documents and parties familiar with the proposed transaction.
Long-Term Projects
Hospitality, retail and residential projects are coming together under the same roof as part of several major multi-use projects in the works across the county.
Much of these developments are centered in North County; multiple investors are planning nearly $10 billion in future plans for the city of Anaheim alone.
One of the more closely watched projects is OC Vibe, a $3 billion plan to transform a 115-acre cluster of land surrounding the city’s Honda Center into a mix of apartments, offices, hotels, dining and entertainment options.
Initial plans call for 2,800 residential units, hotels, more than 800,000 square feet of office space, a new concert venue, food hall, restaurants, parks and other amenities.
Los Angeles Angels team owner Arte Moreno is also making moves on his plan to redevelop the 153-acre site that surrounds Angel Stadium.
SRB Management Co., a firm affiliated with Moreno, submitted conceptual redevelopment plans including more than 5,000 apartments, two hotels, 2.7 million square feet of office space, 12,500 parking spaces, parks and other commercial additions like retail and restaurants.
A third major development proposal was added to Anaheim’s real estate pipeline earlier this year in the form of a potential theme park expansion for Disneyland Resort.
The company is currently in discussions with the city to add new attractions, hotel rooms, retail, dining and other mixed-use elements within the 500-acre resort owned by Burbank-based Walt Disney Co. (NYSE: DIS) over the next several decades.
