Six Santa Rosa buildings sold
SANTA ROSA - An investment group purchased six largely vacant industrial buildings on a portion of the JDSU campus southwest Santa Rosa with plans to aggressively reposition them to satiate a growing local hunger for beverage and food production space.
Giffen Avenue Investments, LLC, purchased an 11.71-acre parcel with 150,000 square feet in existing buildings at the intersection of Giffen Avenue and Lombardi Lane from Wayne, Penn.-based Patriot Northpoint I, LLC, on April 1 for an undisclosed amount. This is the second property sale by Patriot Equities in the campus of Optical Coating Laboratory, now JDSU, since Patriot bought 64 acres of the site in mid-2007 for $26 million.
Giffen Avenue Investments includes Tamimi Investments and Clifton Holdings, LLC, of Oakland. They have been scouting the market several years for “value-add” investment opportunities - ones in which an investor can buy a property with high vacancy or needed upgrades with potential for greater returns after construction and marketing, according to Niniv Tamimi, a Modesto-based real estate investor who is part of this acquisition and an 89-home project in Windsor.
“The absorption rate of industrial space throughout the Bay Area has increased dramatically, and the vacancy rate has fallen quite a bit,” he said. “The Santa Rosa area has just now seen an increase, and we thought we would capture it right now.”
Paul Schwartz of Terra Firma Global Partners is marketing the 90,000-plus square feet not currently occupied by JDSU and spinoff Mac Thin Films.
A major selling point was the existing sewer and water credits from the city of Santa Rosa, something that would particularly appeal to food and beverage production companies, Tamimi said. Those credits allow for about 2 million gallons a month of water and process wastewater.
“Most food-processing and beverage-makers require water and sewer connections,” he said. “Those industries are strong industries to participate in, and we have had experience in the Central Valley with food processors and in Bay Area with beverage and support companies.”
The new owners of the six buildings plan upgrades for the site, now called Tamimi Business Park. Those include modernizing the outside and inside of the buildings, adding parking and adjusting landscaping. Engineering, architectural and landscaping designs already completed are being revised for allow for permit applications to begin in four to six months, depending on tenant demand, Tamimi said.
Parts of the JDSU campus has been sold off as the company’s local presence has contracted in the past decade. Langer Juice Co. in 2012 purchased a 54,500-square-foot former JSDU building from Patriot, and General Hydroponics earlier had purchased a larger but never occupied building from JDSU.
New tenants to the six buildings will need arrangements with PG&E for electricity, which is currently served from an adjacent JDSU-owned power substation under a special rate. Langers took almost a year to make that transition.
On the Windsor housing project, Tamimi is partnering with Turlock-based JKB Living on the proposed 18-acre Victoria Oaks single-family-home development off Hembree Lane just north of the Wal-Mart store.
Mike Flitner and Kevin Doran of Keegan & Coppin represented the buyer and seller of the six JDSU buildings.
