Freeman Spogli Offers to Buy Stake in Koll Management : Acquisitions: The L.A. investment firm would get 48% of Newport Beach company as part of a $23.6-million deal.

The Los Angeles investment firm of Freeman Spogli & Co. has offered to buy a 48% stake in Koll Management Services as part of a $23.6-million deal that would take the nation’s second-largest industrial and office property manager private.

Officials at Koll Management, based in Newport Beach, said Thursday that the buyout would enable the firm to continue an aggressive acquisition campaign. Purchases of other property management companies, such as Rubloff Inc. in Chicago, have nearly doubled Koll’s portfolio to about 120 million square feet in the past year, but the costs of those acquisitions has cut into earnings.

“This will allow us to obtain additional financing to speed up our acquisition program,” said Ray Wirta, chief executive of Koll. “We think this is an opportune time to be buying.”

Koll went public in July, 1991, with an offering of 1.1 million shares priced at $10 each. The company was spun off from privately owned Koll Co., a real estate firm formed in 1962 by prominent Newport Beach developer Donald M. Koll.

Because of falling rents and rising office vacancies during the real estate downturn of the early 1990s, however, Koll Management has posted only lackluster profits. The benefits of the company’s recent buying spree has yet to bolster earnings, analysts said.

“KMS has not done well as a publicly traded company,” said Mark Matheson, an analyst with the brokerage Crowell, Weedon & Co. in Los Angeles. “The stock hardly trades. They just don’t have the resources to attack everything on their plates right now.”

The buyout proposal boosted Koll Management’s stock $2.75 a share to $14.75 in Thursday’s Nasdaq trading, though only 8,700 shares changed hands.

“If Freeman pulls this off, they will get the company cheaply,” said Lawrence Horan, an analyst with Prudential Securities in New York. “Due to recent acquisitions, company earnings are still depressed. I would not be surprised if they were to double in the next three years.”

Under the proposal, Freeman Spogli would pay $15 a share for most of the stock now held by Koll Management’s executives, plus all of the shares now publicly traded.

Donald Koll, who is also chairman of Koll Management, would receive $6.6 million for part of the 64% stake he now owns in the property management firm. Freeman Spogli would pay about $17 million for the public investors’ stake, an estimated 36%.

The transaction would reduce Koll’s ownership to 48%, provide Freeman Spogli a 48% stake and give key employees of Koll Management the other 4%.

The proposal, which has not yet been filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, is being studied by a special independent committee of the Koll Management board, which has hired lawyers and an investment banker to evaluate the plan, officials said Thursday.

For its latest fiscal year, the company reported revenue of $56.7 million, up 46%. Earnings rose 11% to $3 million, or 93 cents a share.

Koll’s Stock Surges

News that Koll Management Services may be taken private again boosted its stock Thursday. Monthly closing stock prices:

Thursday’s close: $14.75

Gaining Space

Since 1989, the company has nearly quadrupled the amount of space it manages. All figures as of March 31; square feet in millions:

‘94: 120