J+R Group Proposes Office-to-Home Conversion in Irvine

J+R Group wants to convert an eight-story office building in Irvine into 76 homes.

The locally based developer led by Morgan Zhang has filed plans to turn part of the 178,000-square-foot office building into apartments at 1901 Main Street, the Orange County Business Journal reported.

The proposal would turn “several floors” of the building to residential units near MacArthur Boulevard and Main Street, a few blocks from John Wayne Airport.

The office property, which includes a five-story parking garage and a parking lot, covers nearly 5 acres. Construction of a separate apartment complex next to the office building is also an option.

A timeline for the office-to-home conversion or apartment building were not disclosed.

J+R bought the fully leased office property in 2016 for $66 million, or $371 per square foot — among the biggest office deals in OC that year.

The building, built in 2002 and later renovated, is now 80 percent leased to such tenants as J+R, on the ground floor, Morgan Stanley, BSH Home Appliances and Synaptics, a semiconductor firm. The parking garage is used as storage for new Tesla cars.

The OC office market contains 104 million square feet and ended last year with a vacancy of 17.3 percent, according to Voit. The Irvine airport market has 24 million square feet and a vacancy of 17 percent, with Class A buildings containing the county’s largest number of high-rise offices at 22 percent.

At the same time, the vacancy of apartments across OC is less than 5 percent, according to RentCafe — with few office-to-home conversions.

In 2022, Calabasas-based Alliant Strategic Development turned a 10-story office building used by the Social Security Administration on North Main Street in Downtown Santa Ana into 148 apartments. Rents for a one-bedroom unit now start at around $2,200.

J+R Group, founded in 2000 in the Pacific Northwest, recently helped develop Collage, a two-story, 16,000-square-foot collection of restaurants near Bloomingdale’s at South Coast Plaza in Santa Ana.

The firm, which has ties to China, has owned 19 commercial properties containing 464,000 square feet on 14 acres, according to its website.

— Dana Bartholomew