Spieker Properties to Buy Southland Office Portfolio

Fast-growing real estate investment trust Spieker Properties Inc. said Wednesday that it will acquire a 3-million-square-foot portfolio of office properties from local real estate figure Shurl Curci’s Transpacific Development Co., one of the region’s most active commercial real estate developers over the last quarter of a century.

The deal is the latest in a string of private real estate portfolio acquisitions by Wall Street-backed REITs.

Menlo Park-based Spieker said it will buy six suburban office projects in California and Arizona from Torrance-based Transpacific and affiliates for $440 million. Transpacific, which developed the California properties, would receive $65 million in Spieker operating partnership units and common stock as partial payment. The sale is expected to close during the first quarter.

Best known among the four Southland projects is Santa Monica Business Park, which encompasses a dozen low-rise buildings totaling nearly 1 million square feet next to Santa Monica Airport. Spieker’s acquisition of that complex, along with the four-building Marina Business Center in Marina del Rey, fits the company’s strategy of focusing on specific markets.

Since hitting town last year with acquisitions of three major Pasadena office buildings, Spieker has focused most of its local attention west of the San Diego Freeway. The company is developing an office building at the Arboretum in eastern Santa Monica, and it recently acquired the 12-story Sepulveda Center tower in West Los Angeles and a 55,500-square-foot office building in Brentwood.

Other Southland properties Spieker is buying from Transpacific include the five-building Cerritos Towne Center and two buildings at 2600 Michelson Drive in Irvine--a market in which Spieker already owns about 630,000 square feet of office space.