Greenlaw Partners spends $58M to repurchase Irvine office building

Greenlaw Partners has repurchased a 315,000-square-foot office tower in Irvine for $57.5 million, nearly half what it traded for a dozen years ago.

The Irvine-based investor led by Wilbur Smith III bought the 13-story building in the Irvine Concourse at 2050 Main Street, the Orange County Business Journal reported. The seller was Boston-based AEW Capital Management. 

The price works out to $183 per square foot, made possible by a $31 million loan from Sunwest Bank.

AEW Capital bought the office property in 2011 for $108.5 million, or $345 per square foot. Greenlaw’s repurchase price represents a 47 percent discount from the previous transaction. 

The building is 72 percent leased, according to CoStar Group, and includes tenant Sunwest Bank, whose name is on top of the building.

The Irvine Concourse includes 48 acres of offices, hotels and restaurants on Main Street  between Von Karman Avenue and MacArthur Boulevard.

The glass-covered building was built in 2007, just before the Great Recession. Two years later, Greenlaw and two other investors paid $56 million for the building, then 30 percent leased. 

By 2011, the Greenlaw partnership boosted occupancy to 80 percent, when they sold the property to AEW Capital for $53 million more than they had paid.

Greenlaw Partners, founded in 2003, has mostly focused on large industrial properties outside Orange County. 

The firm now has $3 billion in assets, and counts a sizable office footprint in Irvine. Across the 405 Freeway from the Irvine Concourse, it owns buildings at the Von Karman Towers office complex.

In June last year, Greenlaw sold a portfolio of eight Amazon.com-leased warehouses across California and Utah for $520 million. 

In August, Greenlaw Partners was found to be one of two “preferred developers” in Anaheim to have been “friendly” with former Mayor Harry Sidhu, who resigned last year amid an FBI corruption probe, according to a report. 

— Dana Bartholomew

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