Maguire Sells 324,000-SF City Plaza Office Tower

GARDEN GROVE, CA-Maguire Properties has sold its 18-story City Plaza office tower, one of the tallest buildings in the area, as the Los Angeles-based REIT continues to shed OC assets. The buyer an an entity owned by Hudson Capital LLC, according to a statement by Maguire.

City Plaza is a 324,000-sf office tower that Maguire bought in 2007 when the REIT acquired a portfolio of properties from Blackstone, according to a public filing by the Los Angeles-based company. The sale as part of Maguire’s previously announced plan to sell some of its Orange County properties in order to eliminate debt and funding obligations and improve funds from operations, according to Nelson Rising, president and chief executive officer, who took over the reins of the company earlier this year and has been pursuing strategies designed to enhance shareholder value.

Rising cites a number of benefits from the sale, including that the deal will eliminate the REIT’s debt obligations for the property, as well as operating losses, and as a result “We will realize an improvement in FFO,” Rising says.

Terms of the City Plaza sale were not disclosed; the sale of the 324,000-sf office project follows closely Maguire’s sale of its 607,000-sf Main Plaza office complex in Irvine for $211 million to San Francisco-based Shorenstein Properties LLC. That deal included Shorenstein’s assumption of the $160.7-million mortgage loan on the property and the transfer to Shorenstein of approximately $10 million of restricted leasing reserves.