ORANGE COUNTY, CA—Most of the office inventory in Orange County has not been reworked to address the needs of today's growing finance, insurance, real estate, technology and healthcare companies, Prudential Real Estate Investors' managing director Tim Hennessey tells GlobeSt.com. As we recently reported, PREI, in a joint venture with McCarthy Cook & Co., has acquired MetroCenter at South Coast, an office campus built on 15 acres with three 12-story office towers and a three-story health club. The joint venture intends to renovate MetroCenter by adding on-site amenities, including a plaza renovation with collaborative outdoor space and updated lobbies and corridors and the addition of a conference center, tenant lounge and rooftop decks. We spoke exclusively with Hennessey about what his firm likes about the Orange County office market and its approach to repositioning in this market.

GlobeSt.com: What attracts PREI to the Orange County market?
Hennessey: We are attracted to the Orange County market for a number of reasons. The region boasts a high quality of life, an educated population and other diverse economic drivers. In addition, Orange County continues to be a high-barrier market where entitlements to build are difficult to obtain. For the office sector in particular, our view is that Orange County is a late-recovery market where rent levels are still at a discount to 2008 rent levels.

GlobeSt.com: What does your firm look for in properties to acquire?
Hennessey: PREI has been very active in the Orange County market over the course of the last year, with acquisitions in the office and retail sectors. Early in 2015, we acquired the Bella Terra shopping center in Huntington Beach. Along with our joint-venture partner DJM Capital Partners, we saw the opportunity to acquire a difficult-to-duplicate retail asset that was directly in the middle of thousands of new apartment units being developed. More recently, we acquired 1301 Dove St. in Newport Beach, which added to our portfolio a well-located, highly functional office building for a price that was a slight discount to today's replacement cost. Lastly, we acquired MetroCenter in Costa Mesa with our joint venture partner McCarthy Cook, representing an opportunity to transform one of the largest office campuses in Orange County into an amenity-rich environment where existing and prospective tenants will be able to enjoy state-of-the-art conference facilities, outdoor areas that encourage collaboration, a "food-truck alley," bocce-ball courts and reimagined lobbies that will have operable walls allowing access to outdoor areas.