Business Center Sites for Sale
In one of the largest real estate offerings in Ventura County history, 25 buildings and 87 undeveloped acres in Oxnard’s Channel Islands Business Center have been placed on the market at an asking price of $29.5 million.
Some offers have already been made for all or part of the package, which occupies more than half the space in a sprawling development launched in the mid-1980s by Told Corp. The properties for sale are now owned by a unit of Wells Fargo Bank.
“Discussions are already being held with some prospective buyers,” said Pat Hall, president of Told Partners, the commercial and industrial brokerage that is marketing the properties in the master-planned business park at Pacific Coast Highway and Pacific Avenue. He declined to identify the interested parties.
In fact, Hall said, some offers were received even before the properties went on the market. “They were premature offers from people who’d heard the offering was pending,” he explained. He said the offers were rejected.
The bulk offering for sale includes two mirror-fronted office buildings totaling 78,000 square feet, 12 multi-tenant industrial-commercial buildings, 11 free-standing industrial buildings and 66 land parcels. In all, 120 acres of the 225-acre Channel Islands development are for sale.
Paul Farry, a member of the Told Partners team that is marketing the holdings, said the land on which the park stands was considered “a secondary site” until 1985, when the Channel Islands park was begun by Told Corp. President Jack Gilbert. “Now it’s probably the best master-planned commercial and industrial development on the Oxnard Plain,” Farry said.
The recent slide in real estate values caused Gilbert to sell his interest in the park earlier this year to ATC Realty Sixteen, the Wells Fargo unit that is offering the properties for sale. Gilbert retained several buildings, two of which he sold in recent months.
Farry said the structures and land currently for sale are available in four separate groups. But premium prices totaling $31.8 million will be asked from prospective buyers who do not bid on the entire project, he added.
