Maguire to Buy Irvine Office Park
Los Angeles real estate investment trust Maguire Properties Inc. announced Wednesday that it had agreed to buy a 16-acre office campus in Irvine occupied by Washington Mutual Inc. for $151.2 million.
Maguire, the largest office landlord in downtown Los Angeles, is purchasing four four-story office buildings totaling 415,597 square feet from an affiliate of the Seattle-based bank, which will remain as a long-term tenant.
The property at Von Karman Avenue and Main Street has entitlements to build an additional 145,270-square-foot, five-story office building. Plans for the project have been completed, and more than $4 million worth of steel has been purchased for the project. Maguire executives plan to begin construction after they find an anchor tenant.
The Irvine office market is improving rapidly for landlords. The vacancy rate fell to 10.8% at the end of September, compared with 17.9% a year earlier, according to commercial brokerage Cushman & Wakefield.
The acquisition, if completed next month as expected, would be Maguire’s third in Orange County. In April, Maguire paid $260 million for the 1.7-million-square-foot former Fluor Corp. headquarters in Irvine. In July, Maguire paid $215 million for 90 acres around that office complex, now known as Park Place. That property has entitlements to develop as much as 2 million additional square feet of offices, stores, a hotel and apartments or condominiums.
Chairman Robert Maguire said the Washington Mutual campus “is uniquely attractive to us because of its close proximity to our Park Place project in Irvine” and the ability to use the property as a source of off-site parking for Park Place.
The Park Place property has a shortage of parking that would be exacerbated by new construction, said real estate analyst Jim Sullivan of Green Street Advisors Inc., so Maguire’s purchase of Washington Mutual’s campus makes sense.
Maguire also should be able to benefit from economies of scale in Orange County in operations such as leasing and property management, he said.
Shares of Maguire rose 8 cents at $23.53 on the New York Stock Exchange.
