SAN DIEGO—Cook Inlet Region Inc., an Alaska Native Corporation has completed a nine-year process to sell a 5-acre land site in the Kearny Mesa submarket here. The property was purchased by the State of California for $10.8 million.

The state plans to construct a California Highway Patrol office on the site, according to Randy LaChance, SVP, SIOR, with Voit Real Estate Services, who, along with Glen Volk, SVP, SIOR, and Paul Brown, VP, represented the seller in the transaction. LaChance tells GlobeSt.com that he had worked on this deal for more than nine years and that the property is one of the last remaining quality land sites in Central San Diego County.

CIRI had owned the site since acquiring it in a US government auction in 1989 when Highway 52 bisected the Miramar Base. According to LaChance, the CIRI tribe had been working with the Voit team and a local development company since 2006 in an effort to entitle the property for the development of a 175,000-square-foot office tower.

“The proposed office development was understandably stalled during the Great Recession, and the entitlement process resumed in 2013,” says LaChance. “The opportunity to sell the land to the State of California emerged as a better solution for our client, and we were able to complete the sale quickly and seamlessly.” He adds that Voit knew this vacant site was well-positioned for new development based on its size and proximity to the I-15 freeway.

LaChance tells GlobeSt.com he and his team had worked with CIRI through the entitlement and sale process, which began in 2005. “There was a joint-venture agreement arranged with a builder, but then the economy started tanking and the developer walked away. They couldn't get tenants or financing, so the deal went dormant.”

In 2012, when the market began to recover, Voit contacted CIRI and began the process of getting the land entitled to build the office tower. “During this process, we saw an ad in a local business journal for a State of California requirement for a CHP office, and our site was right in the middle of it. After a nine-month process of working with a governmental agency and getting funding from the state, we closed on it.”

Regarding overall San Diego leasing and sales trends, LaChance tells GlobeSt.com the market here had seen slow growth until the last couple of quarters, and while lease rates haven't climbed dramatically yet, they are starting to rise. San Diego pricing is behind Orange County and Bay Area pricing, “but we always are. We don't get a lot of big companies—we're not the Inland Empire with access to the port and transportation. That's not who we are. The biggest driving factor down here is the quality of life. People who operate their business in San Diego can find a great, young, well-educated, quality workforce here looking for jobs. There's also good weather and proximity to the ocean and beach.”

As GlobeSt.com reported earlier this month, whether the issues are global, domestic or local, California real estate faces a unique set of challenges and opportunities this year. GlobeSt.com spoke exclusively with four Voit Real Estate Services managing directors in charge of four different California and Western/Southwestern markets—Kevin Sheehan, Sacramento; Eric Northbrook, San Diego; Tom Johnston, Phoenix and Las Vegas; and Eric Hinkelman, Orange County and parts of Los Angeles—about their respective markets and the issues they and the CRE industry as a whole are dealing with this year.