Developers Join Forces to Market Office Space as ‘Centraplex’ Area
A group of local developers wants to give Orange County’s most rapidly growing office area a fast-track name: Orange County Centraplex.
Eight office developers said Monday that they would begin a coast-to-coast promotion to attract more business to a 30-square-mile section in the heart of the county, a section that takes in portions of Santa Ana, Anaheim, Garden Grove and Orange.
The mostly developed area extends from Ball Road on the north to 1st Street on the south and from the Costa Mesa Freeway on the east to Euclid Street on the west. It contains a dozen or so high-rise buildings and is crisscrossed by five freeways.
It showed the highest rate of absorption--newly occupied space--in the county during the first half of 1989 as tenants moved into 616,000 square feet of new office space, according to a survey released last month by Grubb & Ellis.
But the area still has more than 3 million square feet of vacant space. Developers hope that the new name and some high-profile promotion will fill it all--and create a need for 12.6 million square feet of planned space.
The Centraplex group joins the Irvine Business Complex, founded in 1984 to cover the area near John Wayne Airport, and South Coast Metro, founded in 1983 to cover the San Diego Freeway region that includes South Coast Plaza, as the third consortium of developers trying to name and then market a part of the county as a growth center.
“This area looks like the Irvine Business Complex did five years ago,” said Steve Spellman, a partner at Birtcher, who helped set up the group. “Buildings are going up so fast there that we have to start sharing some ideas about the kind of problems, like transportation, that we’ll be facing.”
Members of the group, which owns more than $1 billion in office space in the area, met several months ago with representatives of Caltrans to discuss widening the Santa Ana Freeway. They will continue to share ideas on the area’s needs and develop an international marketing campaign, Spellman said.
Besides Birtcher of Laguna Niguel, other developers involved in the plan are the Huntington Seacliff Corp. of Huntington Beach, IDM Properties of Long Beach, Lincoln Property Co. of Los Angeles and Davis Developments, Hillman Properties, the Koll Co., and Nexus USA Equities, all in Newport Beach.
