Bidders for a federal office building known as the Ziggurat in Laguna Niguel have driven the price to nearly $152 million, more than twice the auction’s starting price.
The bidding war has extended the auction by the General Services Administration of the seven-story, 1 million-square-foot Chet Holifield Federal Building at 24000 Avila Road, the Orange County Register Reported.
Online bidding for the building opened June 5 and was supposed to close July 31 — if bidding had cooled.
But the Ziggurat has been hot since Uncle Sam waived a requirement to preserve the Brutalist concrete structure designed by William Pereira to resemble a Ziggurat, a stepped pyramid in ancient Mesopotamia.
Each day draws more bids, and each day extends the auction for the 91-acre property in south Orange County.
On Monday, four bids flooded into the GSA website before 6 p.m., raising the ante by $1.2 million to $151.8 million.
Since June 5, there have been 72 bids by three unidentified wannabe owners. And bidding will run at least through 6 p.m. on Aug. 27.
The busiest bidding took place during the auction’s first day, with 11 bids from the initial price of $70 million to $125.3 million, a 79 percent jump.
Before the initial deadline, nine bids on July 30 pushed the price to $135.6 million. The next day, three more bids sent the price to $136.8 million.
Every business day since then, at least two bids have been made to keep the auction alive, according to the Register
This is the second auction for the nearly vacant campus. The first auction in late 2022, which required the buyer to preserve the distinctive beige pile, drew no takers.
The stampede of investors to the latest auction — without the preservation restriction — suggests the buyer will likely bulldoze the 53-year-old building.
A study by the Urban Land Institute last year recommended the City of Laguna Niguel should allow a developer to build between 2,000 and 4,000 homes, with a density of 60 to 80 units per acre.
The Brutalistic building, completed in 1971 for North American Aviation, has historic importance in its resemblance to “the ancient ziggurats,” according to the GSA. Uncle Sam bought the building three years later.
For decades, the building housed thousands of federal employees from up to 12 agencies, including 2,000 from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
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Pereira, who died in 1985, designed hundreds of Modernist projects, including the “Theme Building” at Los Angeles International Airport, CBS Television City in Fairfax, the USC master plan in Exposition Park, the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco and the Disneyland Hotel.
He also designed the master plan for the city of Irvine and the UC Irvine campus, as well as a Ford Aerospace headquarters in Newport Beach later replaced by homes.
— Dana Bartholomew