The new leases range from deals for a few thousand square feet by local businesses to larger transactions by regional and national concerns. A host of such deals were completed recently by an Anaheim-based leasing team headed by Jeff Moore of the CBRE Focused Retail Group, including leases both in Orange County and at developing sites in the nearby Inland Empire.

Marianne Waggoner, Ontario-based president of CB Richard Ellis Retail Services in North America, tells GlobeSt.com that the Orange County and Inland Empire activity underscores a generally upbeat performance by retail leasing in Southern California. A recent report distributed by Waggoner, which carried the heading "You're going to like what we see," included comments from a number of CBRE retail specialists around the country, among the Richard Rizika of the company's Torrance office.

Rizika says a number of factors in Southern California, including its diverse economy, are producing "retail sales that far outpace those of other regions in the country." Large, developable parcels will continue to be anchored by such big box" retailers as Wal-Mart, Target, Home Depot, Lowe's and Costco--tenants who are known to attract satellite retailers in search of this type of co-tenancy.

"The development of smaller specialty centers and increasing desire of consumers to shop closer to home will continue throughout Southern California in 2004," Rizika says, noting that one of the traditional "negatives" of the California business climate, the state's growing deficit, has actually benefited the retail industry. "Because of limited allocations to the general funds of local governments, city officials are becoming increasingly reliant on revenues generated from their share of sales tax received," Rizika says. This has forced city governments to reconsider retail developments as a primary means of increasing revenues for a city's general fund, thus enabling additional sites for major retail developments, he observes.

The activity in Southern California is reflected in the host of deals signed recently by Moore and his Focused Retail Services Group. The transactions have involved businesses ranging from small local dry cleaning shops, banks, financial firms and restaurants to large regional and national concerns like Henry's Marketplace grocery store, UPS, Baskin Robbins, Walgreens drug store and others. The tenants have signed for space in a number of communities in Orange County and the Inland Empire, in developments ranging from neighborhood grocery-anchored centers to larger projects.