O.C.’s Koll Co. Sells Industrial Plants to Japanese
In one of the largest sales of Orange County real estate this year, the Koll Co. sold 24 industrial buildings--half of them in the county--for $138 million to Fujita Corp. USA, a Japanese developer with U.S. headquarters in Santa Monica.
Scher-Voit Commercial Brokerage in Irvine, the broker on the deal, said it was one of the largest purchases of industrial buildings in California this year.
The deal also included warehouse, light industrial, and research and development buildings in San Diego, Los Angeles and the San Francisco area. In all, the deal included 1.8 million square feet of space.
Among the larger properties sold by Koll in Orange County were a Garden Grove business park at Garden Grove Boulevard and Western Avenue and the Toshiba building in Irvine with 118,000 square feet of space.
Koll is a huge real estate developer based here that occasionally sells buildings from its $4 billion in West Coast real estate holdings.
Fujita USA, though it has operated in the United States since 1972, is only a small player in the California real estate market. The company specializes in industrial buildings--preferring to stay away from what it says is an overbuilt office market--and until now had owned only 13 buildings in the state.
Fujita is a larger player in the Japanese real estate market, where it owns and develops property as well as doing engineering and construction.
Industrial buildings are often a good investment in California’s urban areas because land is so expensive that few new factories or research and development buildings are being constructed. That means landlords have less competition for tenants in some areas.
Fujita USA said several other buyers had been interested in the Koll buildings since they went on the block about three months ago but declined to identify them.
Koll executives were said to be unavailable for comment.
No specific breakdown was available for how much the Orange County properties accounted for the $138-million price tag. But with half the properties in the county, the deal is sizable and likely ranks among the biggest real estate transactions of the year here.
The other major deals this year also involved foreign buyers. Those were the $104-million purchase of the Dana Point Resort by a Japanese kimono manufacturer, Tokyo Masuiwaya California Corp., and the $245-million sale of two parcels to Australia’s Qintex for construction of another resort hotel. Qintex’s deal for one of the parcels later fell through, however.
