Optima Tax Relief Takes 40K sf at Santa Ana Office Building

Optima Tax Relief has cut a deal for 38,000 square feet of offices at a newly purchased office campus in Santa Ana.

The Santa Ana-based tax firm signed a 40-month lease for offices at one of two 13-story towers at 5 and 6 Hutton Centre Drive, Bisnow reported. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Downtown L.A.-based Barker Pacific Group and Las Vegas-based Kingsbarn Realty Capital bought the 560,000-square-foot Griffin Towers in April for $82 million, or $146 per square foot.

The seller was New York-based Blackstone, which bought the campus in 2014 for $129 million, resulting in a 36 percent loss on the deal. It was 68 percent leased at the time of sale.

It’s not known if new tenants signed on since. On its own, the Optima lease will boost the overall occupancy at the towers to about 75 percent.

“We are encouraged to have this new leasing activity at the project and it bodes well for companies returning to office after the pandemic,” Michael Barker, managing director for Barker Pacific Group, said in a statement.

Brokers Craig Kish and Richard Sung of Newmark represented Optima in the deal. Brokers Dean Chandler, Justin Hill, Peter Wells and Taylor Friend of CBRE represented the landlords.

Net absorption at offices across Orange County was 80,000 square feet in the third quarter, according to a Newmark report, while year-to-date absorption stood at a net negative 1.2 million square feet.

Developers don’t have any new offices under construction, a first since the Great Recession in 2008, with office vacancy in the September quarter at 18.3 percent.

A third of Orange County’s office buildings have occupancy of less than 80 percent, a benchmark under which Newmark says it can become difficult to generate net operating income and pay debt on a property.

— Dana Bartholomew