Koll Co. to Handle Development at Wetlands Area

Koll Co. said Monday that it had been retained to manage the $500-million real estate portfolio of Henley Properties Inc., including the controversial housing development along the Bolsa Chica wetlands abutting Huntington Beach.

As part of the deal, Donald M. Koll was named president and a director of Henley, and his Newport Beach-based firm was hired to oversee Henley’s 15 Southern California properties and holdings in five other states.

Henley operates in California through its subsidiary, Signal Landmark Co. in Irvine.

Neither Henley, a public company based in Hampton, N.H., nor the privately held Koll would disclose the value of the contract. But the management agreement is the largest ever for Koll, which has $4 billion worth of real estate under its control, officials said.

“Don Koll and his highly respected organization will help us to accelerate the development of our real estate projects and undertake various transactions to realize the value of our holdings for the benefit of our shareholders,” Michael D. Dingman, Henley’s chairman and chief executive, said in a prepared statement.

The contract allows Koll to participate in the profits that Henley makes from its projects and also to use Henley’s resources to purchase major blocks of property.

“My major thrust is going to be not only to manage properties but to redo some of the properties to try to get into large portfolios,” Koll said. “We may buy several large properties and either develop them or spin them off.”

The management contract runs for five years with automatic one-year renewals. Signal Landmark’s 45 employees and many of the other 150 Henley Properties employees will move into Koll headquarters in Newport Beach, Koll said.

“The whole thing is exciting to us,” Koll said. “We’ll have a public company, which we will be in charge of for making profits.”

While the Koll firm is privately held, Koll himself sits on the board of Wells Fargo and Grubb & Ellis.

Henley’s biggest single holding is the 12,000-acre Bolsa Chica wetlands and surrounding area that its Signal Landmark unit has been working on for years to develop. In an intricate plan drafted last year with the city, Orange County and the state, Signal Landmark reached a compromise that calls for preserving most of the Bolsa Chica area as natural wetlands but allows up to 5,700 homes on 412 acres on the bluff areas.

Times staff writer Bill Billiter contributed to this report.