Buyers, Sellers Both in the Game in OC

Now's a good time for both buyers and sellers of SoCal CRE, CT Realty Investors CEO Watty Watson tells us. (Which means it's not a good time for those mattresses that don't get stuffed with cash anymore.) Not even multifamily is out of balance, and both sides of the table are benefiting from improving fundamentals.

The first OC property type to recover from the recession, Watty says, was industrial--multifamily never really took a hit--and self-storage has been "amazingly resilient" in recent years. Now even office is making a comeback with the recovery of the mortgage business. Even so, prices aren't unsustainably high, which is good for buyers, who are also still benefiting from low interest rates. At last week's Ninth Investment Real Estate Luncheon at the Irvine Marriott, the Orange County Council, Boy Scouts of America honored Watty with the Good Scout Award for his contributions to the the community. The luncheon also included a memorial tribute to the late Don Koll for his legacy with the organization.

CT Realty has been very active as a buyer and seller of SoCal product recently, Watty says. In a JV with Artemis Real Estate Partners Fund I, the company sold the 123k SF Irvine Spectrum in Irvine for $11.8M to an owner/userafter owning the property for only three months. The JV had planned to renovate the building and market it as a corporate HQ facility in the Orange County industrial market, but the opportunity to sell it came up first. One of the factors driving interest in this kind of property is the widespread conversion of industrial sites to multifamily. Thus industrial buyers are eager to snap up sites that havent been converted. (Warehouses need to be protected.)