Irvine Co., Orange County’s dominant office landlord with a local portfolio topping 26 million square feet, has had an active few weeks in two of its other key markets: Silicon Valley and San Diego.
The Newport Beach-based company, California’s biggest office owner with about 150 properties and 550 buildings to its name, recently completed three blockbuster leases in Silicon Valley totaling a little more than 1 million square feet, according to local news reports.
The largest was with Analog Devices, a Norwood, Mass.-based maker of integrated circuits. The company was reported in January to have leased two full buildings at Irvine Co.’s new Santa Clara Square® development just off the 101 Freeway for a total of about 440,000 square feet.
The space will hold more than 900 Analog employees.
The company bought Milpitas-based competitor Linear Technology last year.
A few weeks before the deal, Irvine Co. said it struck its own deal with a subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd. for another, 225,000-square- foot building at the mixed-use development.
The office portion of Santa Clara Square®, which also includes a shopping center and a big apartment complex that’s under construction, totals about 1.7 million square feet and is already more than 90% leased.
Also in Silicon Valley, Irvine Co. reportedly struck a deal with tech firm Synopsys Inc. for a 360,000-square-foot prelease at a future office project in the city of Sunnyvale.
The buildings would be the first phase of a nearly 1.5-million-square-foot office development called Pathline Park, a site Irvine Co. bought a few years ago, according to the Silicon Valley Business Journal, which was the first to report on the Synopsis lease.
In San Diego, Irvine Co.’s biggest recent news was on the acquisition front. It paid a reported $105 million for the Gateway at Torrey Hills office complex in the Del Mar Heights community, just off the 5 Freeway at Carmel Mountain Road.
The property was built a decade ago and totals 197,862 square feet, putting the sale at $530 per square foot, well above the going rate of a high-end office in OC. Local news reports said the seller was PGIM Real Estate.
In September Irvine Co. bought another building in Del Mar Heights, its first office buy in the immediate area.
Heading North
Costa Mesa-based homebuilder Warmington Residential plans to expand operations to Ventura County and the Central Coast.
The privately held company said this month that it’s “aggressively pursuing” a mix of infill, urban and suburban land deals in the region.
Land deals won’t be only for housing, but could also include retail and commercial uses, the company said.
Warmington said it’s hired Bill McReynolds as director of land acquisition for the region. He’s based in Ventura.
“With existing divisions in both Southern and Northern California, geographically this region makes sense for Warmington and aligns well with the company’s current market areas,” Jay Deckard, senior vice president for the builder, said in a statement.
In OC, the company’s selling homes at Beacon Park in Irvine and at Rancho Mission Viejo.
It’s built about 40,000 homes in California and Nevada over its history.
Gaming Growth
Blizzard Entertainment Inc. is adding more office space in the Irvine Spectrum area.
The largest software company based in OC, with an estimated 2,000 local employees, already leases approximately 450,000 square feet at two Spectrum-area office complexes.
It’s adding 22,000 square feet to that, according to CoStar Group Inc. data. The market tracker reports that the maker of the “World of Warcraft” online game and an esports league (see technology column, below) will lease space at Irvine Co.’s 9 Pasteur building, which is close to its existing operations.
Blizzard’s fenced-off headquarters property, the 235,000-square-foot Alton Corporate Center campus, is owned by Irvine Co.
It also leases a similar amount at Olen Properties Corp.’s Irvine Oaks office campus, which is across the street from its headquarters on Laguna Canyon Road.
Originally published on 2/12/2018, Orange County Business Journal
