Cushman & Wakefield Lands 3M-SF Portfolio

NEWPORT BEACH, CA-Bixby Land Co. has named Cushman & Wakefield as property manager for a portfolio of nearly 3.5 million sf of office, industrial and retail properties in Southern California. Berkeley Davis, director of property management for Bixby Land Co., tells GlobeSt.com that the assignment includes the bulk of Bixby’s holdings except for about 700,000 sf of properties that the locally based private REIT owns in Northern California and Arizona.

With the new assignment, Cushman & Wakefield will manage 37 properties throughout Southern California for Bixby Land. Davis tells GlobeSt.com that Bixby Land in the past has managed some of the properties in house and has relied on third party management for others.

Cushman & Wakefield won the contract “as a result of an impressive bidding effort,” Davis says. She notes that Cushman & Wakefield also was helpful recently in Bixby Land’s due diligence process when the locally based company was acquiring five Orange County office projects.

Cindy Burger, a director with Cushman & Wakefield’s client solutions group, will be managing the portfolio. Cindy Osmundson, named portfolio manager, will be supervising the office part of the portfolio.

The portfolio consists of 1.6 million sf of industrial, 1.3 million sf of office and 600,000 sf of retail space. The office properties include buildings in Newport Beach, Irvine and Seal Beach, while the industrial space comprises buildings in the Inland Empire ranging from 20,000 sf to 400,000 sf. Most of the retail properties are in Long Beach.

The new property management contract follows Bixby’s expansion of its holdings in recent months with the $345-million acquisition of a portfolio of Orange County office buildings from Los Angeles-based Maguire Properties. The deal with Maguire added 11 buildings totaling 816,000 sf at five locations in Newport Beach, Irvine and Seal Beach to the Bixby Land portfolio.

Besides the space it acquired, Bixby plans a new 100,000-sf, four-story office building on a development site at 17300 Red Hill Ave. in Irvine that was part of the deal with Maguire. The firm also has been active in the industrial market lately, signing several large leases at its Bixby Redlands Business Center, a 227-acre masterplanned business park in the Inland Empire.