Others Picking Up Mortgage-Industry Slack

IRVINE, CA—Despite a contraction of space from the mortgage-lending industry in recent years, other industries are picking up the absorption slack in Orange County’s office market. Curtis Ellmore, SVP at JLL, tells GlobeSt.com that life-insurance and healthcare companies, as well as banks and financial firms, are taking up much of the space the mortgage industry has left behind.

According to a report from JLL, although the local economy has undergone a significant diversification a significant diversification process over the past five years, Orange County is as heavily tied to the mortgage-lending sector today as it has historically been. While, two years ago, many of these firms were aggressively expanding local operations, as GlobeSt.com previously reported—including Cash Call and Greenlight Financial, who each signed multiple expansion deals in 2012—today the growth that had been fueled by refinancing business stimulated by record-low interest rates has all but ceased. In fact, some tenants have begun to make payroll cuts and market space for sublease in response to the decrease in business. This includes Cash Call, which is currently working toward downsizing its 400,000-square-foot footprint by more than half.