BCE Unit Asks $350 Million for 4,400 Acres
The West Coast division of Canada’s BCE Development Corp. on Thursday hung a For Sale sign and a $350-million price tag on 4,400 acres of residential and industrial properties, most in Southern California.
BCE Development’s commercial projects, including the $1-billion, 66-acre MacArthur Place “urban village” near Orange County’s John Wayne Airport, are not included in the proposed sale. BCE Development’s Western regional office in Irvine is overseeing that project.
The biggest parcel in the BCE Development land sale, which is being offered as a single package, is a 2,200-acre residential and industrial project in Carlsbad, near the La Costa Country Club in north San Diego County. Also included in the package is 200 acres near Corona, the Hamilton Cove luxury condominium development on Catalina and 900 acres of residentially zoned property near Seattle.
A spokesman for BCE Development in Vancouver said Thursday that the company, a subsidiary of Canada’s largest public company, BCE Inc., wants to get out of residential development and concentrate on commercial projects in which it would retain ownership of the land.
BCE Inc. is the holding company for Bell Canada, the nation’s major telephone utility, as well as for TransCanada Pipeline Ltd. and a number of other firms.
In Early Development
It owns 67% of BCE Development, which was formed in 1985 when BCE Inc. acquired majority ownership of Daon Corp., a major Canadian development firm that had invested billions of dollars in U.S. properties and was nearly wiped out in the 1979-81 Southern California real estate collapse.
The BCE Development spokesman said all of the properties are part of projects originally begun by Daon, and most are in early stages of planning or development.
BCE officials were attending a board meeting in Canada on Thursday and could not be reached for comment.
Steve Johnson, vice president of Meyers Group, a real estate consulting firm in Corona, called the proposed sale a “major transaction in the real estate industry.” He said he was “very surprised they did not wait six to nine months” to put the land on the market “because prices are going to heat up even more, and they probably could have gotten even more for it if they’d waited.”
He said, however, that the $350-million asking price did not seem out of line for the types of property being offered and thus would not be likely to add to the forces that are driving Southland real estate prices ever upward.
Johnson said the bulk of the $350-million value “probably” is in the land near La Costa, where property values “are substantial.”
