Boise Cascade Lease Ranks With Largest

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the square footage is among the largest industrial leases this year in Orange County, with asking rates for comparable industrial space in the county running in the mid-40-cent range per sf per month, triple-net.The new space will house a regional distribution facility for Boise Cascade's Office Solutions division. Boise Cascade acquired OfficeMax, Inc. in December of last year, which more than doubled the size of the Office Solutions division, which is based in Itasca, IL. Boise will be consolidating a 180,000-sf Boise Office Solutions distribution facility in Garden Grove and a 90,000-sf Office Max distribution facility in Buena Park to the 7300 Chapman Ave. location. The company is slated to occupy its portion of the 507,435-sf, single-story, concrete tilt-up building in January. Ward, who represented both the tenant and the landlord, Parsippany, NJ-based Sudler Management Co. LLC, tells GlobeSt.com that industrial leases of this size are rare in Orange County for a number of reasons. Relatively few spaces as large as this are available in the county; Orange County generally is not a market of huge users likethose found in the nearby Inland Empire, and rising costs for real estate, utilities and workers compensation are pushing tenants to other areas. "There really are not a lot of large users looking to set up shop in Orange County, which is a trend that has been going on for some time," Ward tells GlobeSt.com. "The bigger users are more likely tolook to the Inland Empire or out of state."The space at 7300 Chapman was never officially on the market, Ward notes, pointing out that Boise Cascade's lease of the space coincided with GES Exposition Service's departure from the building. The Boise Cascade lease is one of the largest industrial deals of any kind since earlier this year when Royalty Carpet purchase a 372,096-sffacility in Santa Ana in a transaction brokered by Ward.