Menlo Park Developer Adds to O.C. Holdings

A Northern California commercial real estate developer with a growing appetite for Orange County properties said Wednesday it has acquired the 225,000-square-foot Stadium Towers Plaza office building and two other local office complexes.

The deal is part of Menlo Park-based Spieker Properties Inc.’s $725-million purchase of properties from Goldman, Sachs & Co. and gives Spieker more than $200 million worth of commercial holdings in Orange County. They range from a six-story bank building in Huntington Beach to a 476,000-square-foot complex of office buildings in Orange.

Spieker, which has been buying developed properties in Orange County for more than 18 months, sees the area as “a growing market with one of the free world’s largest economies and a place where there are still good buys in real estate,” said Craig Vought, the company’s chief financial officer.

Commercial real estate throughout Southern California has been changing hands at an increasingly rapid pace, and at steadily escalating prices, as the area’s economy rebounds from a lengthy recession.

In Wednesday’s purchase, Spieker obtained 44 properties, mainly office and industrial buildings, in California, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico. The properties had been part of the co-called WCB portfolio controlled by Goldman, Sachs’ Whitehall Street real estate fund.

In addition to Stadium Towers and the 57,000-square-foot East Hills office complex in Anaheim, regional properties in the portfolio included the 65,000-square-foot Centerpointe office complex in Irvine, a 113,000-square-foot industrial warehouse in Ontario, a 223,000-square-foot warehouse in Redlands and 250,000 square feet of buildings in north San Diego County, Vought said.

The purchase increases Spieker’s holdings by about 23% to more than 34 million square feet.

Spieker said it will keep 32 properties and sell the rest, located in Georgia, Texas, Florida, Massachusetts, Florida and Pennsylvania. The real estate investment trust plans to reinvest the proceeds of the sales in properties in its key markets on the West Coast.

Terms of the acquisition call for Goldman, Sachs to receive cash and $75 million to $150 million in Spieker operating partnership units, convertible into Spieker stock.