Voit Development Co. has acquired nearly one-half million square feet of space on 26 acres in the Conejo Spectrum for about $50 million. The acquisition was financed by Buchanan Street Partners, which invested $15.7 million in equity along with debt financing for the property. It is the second time that the property, which includes two buildings, has changed hands in about a year, when Palisades Associates acquired it from the IDS Real Estate Group. Palisades paid a reported $34 million at the time, netting it a tidy sum in this latest transaction. Buchanan and Voit are presumably banking on tenanting the property, which has had a somewhat checkered history. Telecom giant Alcatel-Lucent originally leased about 150,000 square feet of the space in 2000, and began making tenant improvements to build out the facility when the tech wreck hit. Work stopped, leaving the space looking especially dismal. Since then, several brokers have been engaged to try to sublease the space with no success, despite the increasingly tight market for industrial facilities. In part the problem was the unfinished state of the space. Alcatel didn’t want to invest in completing the tenant improvements, and there was no incentive for the landlords to invest in the work, especially during the early 2000s when there wasn’t much demand. But since then, leasing the property has posed other problems, namely the move to outsourcing by many tech companies, which has impacted demand for large amounts of industrial space in the Conejo. “Alcatel wanted to get rid of it all in one swoop, so that’s a big space for the market,” said John DeGrinis, senior vice president at Colliers International who was one of the brokers who took a turn at subleasing the property. “When Alcatel leased the space their intention was to make cable modems. Guess what? They are now producing those in China. That’s what’s really impacted that segment of the market.” Voit and Buchanan are moving to find a tenant for the space, but they are in a no-risk situation, since Alcatel continues to pay rent under its lease. Almost all of the rest of the space in the buildings is currently leased as well. “These particular properties provide a great opportunity to improve existing space and leverage the fact that a lot of the square footage is currently unoccupied, but leased by two tenants,” said Steve Blue, senior vice president of Buchanan Street Partners in a prepared statement. “Add to that a three percent vacancy rate in Conejo Spectrum, and this has all the makings of a great value add opportunity.” The balance of the property is leased to a range of tenants including Teradyne, Baxter and an RV storage company, among others. Other parts of the business park have also been slow to lease recently, although most say that the weakness is a short term one. “As the supply of larger blocks of contiguous space that are reasonably priced in the Conejo diminishes, their time has come,” said Kevin Shannon, vice chairman at CB Richard Ellis who, along with CB’s Ken Ashen and Nick Gregg, represented the buyer and seller in the deal. “It’s a great demographic growth trend, and it’s a market timing deal.” Another property in the park, 2590 Conejo Spectrum, was just leased to Sage Publications Inc. Sage leased the 77,172-square-foot facility for a five-year term for $4.1 million, but it took the brokers eight months before a tenant was found. That, despite the fact that the building is almost brand new and has a full array of bells and whistles, said DeGrinis, who, with Colliers’ Patrick DuRoss, represented the landlord, Western States Technologies. Sage was represented by Tom Dwyer and Michael Slater at CB. “We sat with it for eight months and this building is unbelievable,” said DeGrinis. “Right now we’re just at a point in time where the tech community is not growing by leaps. But there will come a time when people will recognize there is a scarcity of land and there is no place else to grow.” Glendale Books Big Tenant Glendale finally got a new tenant, and a big one at that. YELLOWPAGES.COM has leased 73,611 square feet of office pace at 611 North Brand Boulevard in a transaction valued in excess of $12.5 million. The deal is especially notable because Glendale has suffered under a high office vacancy rate over 16 percent as of the fourth quarter of 2006. But with so little space available in nearly every other submarket of the San Fernando Valley, brokers have felt it would only be a matter of time before tenants were forced to reconsider the area. “Glendale has been a much less dynamic marketplace in the past several years than its neighbors Burbank and Pasadena, both of which have enjoyed single digit vacancy,’ said Nico M. Vilgiate, senior vice president with CB Richard Ellis who, with CB’s Todd Doney, represented YELLOWPAGES.COM.The landlord, Maguire Properties, was represented inhouse by Josh Wrobel. Senior reporter Shelly Garcia can be reached at (818) 316-3123 or by e-mail at [email protected] .