TGS Management pays $240M to buy 42 acres for Irvine data hub

Low-profile hedge fund pays $5.7M an acre, plans 500K sf data center

TGS Management's Fred Taylor and FivePoint's Daniel Hedigan (FivePoint, Getty)
TGS Management's Fred Taylor and FivePoint's Daniel Hedigan (FivePoint, Getty)

TGS Management has bought 42.1 acres of land in Southeast Irvine for $240 million to build a data processing hub.

An affiliate of the Irvine-based quantitative finance hedge fund acquired the property on Barranca Parkway in the Irvine Spectrum, the Orange County Business Journal reported. The seller was Five Point Holdings, based in the city.

The sale of the undisclosed address near the 405 and 5 freeways marks the largest real estate deal in the city since 2020. TGS, under a venture called Barranca Properties, paid $5.7 million per acre for the parcel.

Unidentified brokers at CBRE represented FivePoint in the deal.

The low-profile hedge fund aims to build a data processing center larger than 500,000 square feet for its finance operations, unidentified real estate sources told the Business Journal. It is the firm’s largest local investment to date.

The property can fit nine buildings totaling 721,300 square feet, according to a site plan obtained by the Business Journal. The buildings, as designed by Irvine-based Ware Malcomb, could range from 26,700 to 131,100 square feet.

TGS, run by billionaire Fred Taylor, was founded three decades ago as one of the first quantitative investing firms, which employs computer algorithms to make its investments.

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The company now owns more than 60 acres in Irvine, including its headquarters, and leases a 115,000-square-foot building at the Irvine Company’s Spectrum Terrace office campus.

In 2020, TGS bought a 4.6-acre office property at 23 Pasteur off the 405 Freeway for $28 million, where it’s now building a 48,300-square-foot data center for quantitative trading.

In 2021, the company paid $50 million for two buildings containing 138,000 square feet at 1-3 Banting Road, once used as a South Orange County campus for California State University — Fullerton. It’s not clear what it wants to do with the 12-acre site.

FivePoint has two other commercial properties for sale in Irvine, including a 31.9-acre site and a 6-acre site in the Great Park Neighborhoods, for between $5 million and $7 million an acre.

Several industrial developers have put in bids to buy the 31.9-acre property, which could squeeze four buildings totaling 547,100 square feet, ranging from 62,300 square feet to 199,000 square feet, according to the Business Journal.
The 6-acre site could include a single industrial building of 116,600 square feet.

— Dana Bartholomew