In Orange County, it’s Jeff Bezos’ world, and we’re just living in it.
Last week’s Insider noted Amazon splashing $63.2M million for the OC Register’s former printing press facility in Santa Ana. See page 30 for more details on its plans for a last-mile distribution center there, and other development activity in Downtown Santa Ana, as part of this week’s Commercial Real Estate Special Report.
Two more Amazon deals came to light late last week, making the Santa Ana deal a relatively small one in comparison.
In Irvine, record show Amazon spending another $112.5M to buy excess land next to Parker-Hannifin’s Spectrum-area facilities. It’s the top reported non-residential land sale seen in OC this year.
In Cypress, industrial developer Duke Realty has paid more than $70M to buy out its partner for land and buildings at Mitsubishi Motors’ former base in the city, records indicate. Duke has filed plans for a distribution facility at a portion of the site—to serve Amazon.
See the print edition of next week’s Business Journal for more.
Pandemic, recession, fires, protests, politics—there’s plenty of people looking for ways to get away from 2020.
And more are looking to do it quickly, and in style, noted a story in last week’s Detroit Free Press, highlighting the 2020 successes of Irvine’s Shelby Legendary Cars.
The boutique automaker makes Shelby Cobra and Ford GT40 cars of the vintage that were featured in the ‘Ford v Ferrari’ film. They can run from $80,000 to $500,000.
In 2018 and 2019, the company sold 350 to 400 cars, the newspaper reported. This year, the company expects to sell 500 cars if not more.
“We were totally blown away. It started in March and it got crazy,” CEO Lance Stander told the Free Press. Low-interest loans and money saved by not traveling this year is fueling the sales, although plenty of out-of-towners are reportedly making the trip to Irvine to pick up their vehicles.
Those doing so would do well to track down Ted Segerstrom—his father Hal served as managing partner of C.J. Segerstrom & Sons with his first cousin, Henry Segerstrom, until his death in 1994—who has amassed one of the largest private collections of Shelbys and other vintage cars.
In 2018, he filed plans with Irvine to open the Segerstrom Shelby Center at a building he owns in the Spectrum. It’s not far from a collection of car dealerships, the Mercedes-Benz Classic Center and Amazon’s just-bought Parker-Hannifin site
The abrupt shuttering of Hollywood streaming service Quibi late last month wasn’t good news for the money behind the Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman-backed startup, which lasted just about six months and burned through a reported $1.75 billion. But it takes OC off the hook for being home to the biggest venture-backed flameout, according to VC market tracker PitchBook.
That dubious honor previously was held by Anaheim’s Fisker Automotive, which raised around $1.2 billion before filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2013, six years after its founding. Fisker’s since been reborn as Karma Automotive, which bought much of the bankrupt firm’s assets and now is in the Irvine Spectrum, a few blocks from the just-bought Amazon site.
