WiredRE Lists Irvine Data Center

IRVINE, CA-Colocation specialist Grupo SMS has named San Francisco-based Wired Real Estate Group (WiredRE), a colocation and data center real estate advisory firm, as the listing agent to lease 10,000 square feet of data center space in a 37,000-square-foot building here. Everett Thompson, president of WiredRE, tells GlobeSt.com that the space is being offered on a wholesale basis, meaning that pricing for the space will be comparable to what a tenant might pay if it built out data center space for itself.

Ideally, Grupo SMS would like to lease all 10,000 square feet of the data center space to a single tenant, but Thompson points out that, “We will do deals from a few hundred square feet to the entire 10,000 square feet.” Regardless of the amount of space a tenant leases, it will still be offered on a wholesale basis, Thompson says.

Thompson calls the 10,000 square feet of data center space “a unique opportunity” in Irvine, where other existing colocation facilities “are full, and most are running into power and cooling constraints,” he says. The WiredRE president points out that the market for colocation space remains strong despite the recession and that hardly any new space is being developed because of financing constraints and the high cost of building data center space–which typically costs more than three times as much to build as general purpose office space.

The Grupo SMS data center facility in Irvine is a single-story building at 17770 Cartwright Rd. and was refurbished in 2004 to its current standards, which include multi-carrier access, with TWT, Qwest, Paetec, Level 3, Cox, AT&T, and Verizon pre-deployed for neutral interconnection, without local loops. Thompson explains that the amount of rentable space in a data center typically is about half of the total building square footage, and in the case of 17770 Cartwright the rentable square footage is about 20,000 square feet. Grupo SMS occupies about 5,000 square feet of the rentable space and is marketing about 5,000 additional square feet on a retail basis.

Top retail rates for colocation space can run north of $40 per square foot per month, Thompson says, so the wholesale rate offered at 17770 Cartwright represents significant potential savings for tenants. Wholesale rates charge for electrical power on a pass-through basis rather than via a fixed monthly charge, for example, which Thompson says can be especially beneficial for “the type of enterprise companies” that are typical in Orange County.

WiredRE earlier this year launched its free listing service for colocation and data center space to support the firm’s brokerage practice. “It’s really difficult for people to find property info on data centers, so we launched a website to help solve thatproblem,” Thompson says. The site (www.wiredre.com/data-centers), lists retail, wholesale and shell data center sites, including mapping of street locations. One of WiredRE’s goals is to identify 5,000 colocation and data center sites by the end of 2009.