Regions West | Orange County
Report: Irvine Buys into SoCal Archstone Portfolio for $1.4B
Oct 4, 2007
By: Adam Perrotta, News Writer

Orange County, Calif.-based real estate firm Irvine Co. has agreed to buy a majority stake in apartment owner Archstone-Smith Trust's Orange County and San Diego holdings in a $1.4 billion deal.

The Irvine deal is part of the larger buyout of Archstone-Smith by the partnership of Tishman Speyer Properties and Lehman Bros. The venture will pay $15.2 billion to acquire Archstone and its more than 86,000 apartment units in the United States and Germany. The buyout was approved by Archstone shareholders on Aug. 21, and is expected to close on Friday.

Now it seems that the new owners of the Archstone portfolio will offload most of the interest in Archstone's Southern California properties to Irvine. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week, Irvine will pay $1.4 billion for a 90 percent stake in the SoCal portfolio, with Tishman and Lehman retaining the remaining 10 percent.  According to the report, the portfolio consists of 18 properties and a total of 6,137 units.

Privately-held Irvine Co. owns properties across all sectors in San Diego, Orange and Los Angeles counties and Silicon Valley. The firm operates The Irvine Ranch, one of the largest such master-planned development projects in history. The 94,000-acre area encompasses nearly one-fifth of Orange County and is home to some 260,000 people.

The larger buyout of Archstone cleared one of its final hurdles yesterday when the European Commission okayed the deal, which includes the buyers' assumption of $6.5 in billion in debt in addition to the purchase price.


 
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