Orange County Buildings Listed : New Publications Address Office Space Surplus
Spawned by the surplus of offices, a full-color guide to available commercial space in Orange County has rolled off the presses and a more ambitious magazine-style publication is in the making.
The Orange County Media Group, publishers of four monthly business newspapers in Orange County, debuted New Offices in July. The most recent edition has slide-size photographs of 34 projects in the country, ranging from office cottages in San Juan Capistrano to high rises in the Santa Ana-Newport Beach-Irvine area.
The August edition consisted of six pages, two more pages than the debut issue. Both editions turned a profit, the company said.
Accompanying each photograph of an office building is a brief description of the facility and the lease price. “The prospective tenant can do a drive-by (on) the project and never leave his or her desk,” said Drew Lawler, Orange County Media Group publisher.
Lawler said the six-page publication is mailed to 21,000 company presidents in the area, all of whom employ five or more people, and to major real estate brokers.
L.A. Guide Planned
A similar guide for Los Angeles is planned later this year or early in 1987, he said.
Due in March is an annual office guide published by Portland, Ore.-based MediaAmerica Inc. In addition to maps and listings of available office space, the magazine-style guide will have feature articles dealing with Orange County’s business climate, available services, housing and life style. “Our approach is just like a business magazine,” said publisher Glenn Fischer. MediaAmerica has produced similar guides in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Omaha and St. Louis.
The 1986 edition of the Los Angeles guide had 1,500 listings, representing 42.7 million square feet of available space. Fischer said the Orange County edition will probably have at least 900 listings.
Distribution will be through the mails to brokers and companies and overseas to businesses that might consider expansion in California.
Fischer said the company expects to print about 15,000 copies of the Orange County guide.
The Orange County chapter of the Building Owners and Managers Assn., a trade group based in Washington, will help compile the listings and will assist in developing an editorial and circulation plan, Fischer said.
Both publications will compete with Black’s Office Guide, an annual publication of New York-based McGraw-Hill Inc. Black’s Los Angeles-Orange County directory has about 2,600 listings as well as listings of what is under construction. For its next edition, due Jan. 1, Black’s will include listings in Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura counties, thus adding another 250 listings to the edition.
Black’s isn’t particularly worried about the new competition. “Black’s Guide is the Cadillac . . . the reference work of the industry,” said David Black, publisher of the Los Angeles-Orange County guide.
The new guides are capitalizing on the surplus of office space in the California and the nation, a condition that probably will change in coming years as new tax legislation brakes the construction boom which has created a surplus of commercial space from Orange County, Calif., to Orange County, Fla.
The tax legislation “will impose a discipline on developers that wasn’t there before,” said Stan Ross, co-managing partner of Los Angeles-based Kenneth Leventhal & Co., an accounting and consulting concern.
Until the discipline is reflected in a reduction in commercial space, the office directories should attract plenty of listings and readers.
More competition for the listings is on the way. The Wall Street Journal plans to begin a weekly advertising section on office space beginning Sept. 22.
Because of the information they provide, the guides will be useful “even if and when the overbuilt space is absorbed,” said Fred Pierce, director of real estate consulting at the Goodkin Group in La Jolla.
