Key Users Need More From Office Stock

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.