-Sage Publication, headquartered at 2455 Teller Road in Thousand Oaks, signed a lease with Burbank’s Cusumano Real Estate Group in June for about 100,400 square feet at 2400 Conejo Spectrum Drive in Thousand Oaks to relocate some of its 500 local employees from another building. Lease terms were not disclosed. -SteelWave bought a 157,508-square-foot office building at 225 W. Hillcrest Drive in Thousand Oaks for $32.8 million from Rising Realty Partners Inc. in April. -PennyMac Financial Services Inc. signed a long-term lease for 60,466 square feet at 3043 Townsgate Road in Westlake Village. Terms of the lease were not disclosed, but the asking rate at the property is $3.35 a square foot. -DSB Properties Inc. of Westlake Village bought the Shops at Oak Creek, a five-building shopping center on 5.72 acres at 28941- 29145 Canwood St. in Agoura Hills, for $27.8 million from Loja Real Estate LLC of Walnut Creek in April. -Oppidan Investment Co. in St. Paul, Minn. bought a 43,138-square-foot Orchard Supply Hardware home improvement center, at 1934 E. Avenida de Los Arboles in Thousand Oaks, for $16.8 million from Butler Champion Ltd. of Los Angeles in June. -In April, Herri Holdings Corp., a Hong Kong-based biopharmaceutical firm, bought an 88,064-square-foot office building on 5.4 acres at 2300 Corporate Center Drive, Thousand Oaks, for $9.9 million. The seller was Chicago-based REIT First Industrial Realty Trust. -FDSI Logistics of Westlake Village bought a 5,499-square-foot Class B office building at 5010 Chesebro Road in Alesco Agoura Corporate Center in Agoura Hills, for $2 million from private seller David K. Dorenfeld of Calabasas in May. Conejo Valley office and industrial vacancy and rent rates continued to move in the second quarter based on activity in other submarkets to the south and the east. Office vacancy dropped more than 3 percentage points to 15.1 percent from a year ago – a good sign after the 20-plus percent rates of recent years – but ticked up compared to 14.8 percent in the first quarter, according to data from Colliers International. That slightly slower activity stems from slow real estate activity in Woodland Hills, said Kevin Fenenbock, senior vice president at Colliers. The western San Fernando Valley has historically fed migration into the Conejo Valley. “That migration has slowed a little, due to the weakness in the Warner Center submarket, where there are lots of vacancies,” Fenenbock said. “Migration will stay flat in the foreseeable future. If tenants can stay in the Valley, and the economies are good, they’ll stay in the Valley.” There’s also been no change in Conejo Valley asking rents, which remained flat at $2.19 a square feet since a year ago. “Many owners are trying to keep rental rates up, but offset them with free rent, which can help reduce effective rents,” Fenenbock said. Several significant deals closed in the quarter, including the $32.8 million sale of 225 W. Hillcrest Drive in Thousand Oaks, a 157,500-square-foot office building that was one of 10 properties L.A.-based developer Rising Realty Partners Inc. acquired in 2013 from Bank of America Corp. for a total of $200 million. The Charlotte, N.C. bank inherited the real estate portfolio when it bought out defunct mortgage lender Countrywide Financial Services of Calabasas in 2008. Rising sold the Thousand Oaks property to SteelWave, a commercial real estate investment firm in Foster City. On the lease side, PennyMac Financial Services Inc. signed a long-term lease on March 31 for a 60,466-square-foot building in the soon-to-be-completed Westlake Park Place, at 3043 Townsgate Road, with property owners Amstar of Denver and Searles Property Group of Newport Beach. The mortgage lender, currently based in Moorpark, will move its headquarters to Westlake Village in the fourth quarter. It plans to retain its space in Moorpark. Lease terms were not disclosed, but the asking rate at the property is $3.35 a square foot, according to Michael Foxworthy, executive vice president with Daum Commercial Real Estate and leasing broker for the building. Industrial space in the Conejo Valley continues to be beyond the reach of many prospective buyers and tenants with a vacancy rate of 2.2 percent and only 7.2 million square feet of inventory in the market. With such limited space, industrial buildings that have been unpopular because they have office space on a partial second floor are now getting picked up, said John DeGrinis, senior vice president at Colliers. “We’re starting to see them slowly absorbed off the market and now there is nothing left,” he said. The increasingly tight San Fernando Valley industrial markets, where vacancy rates range from 2 percent to 0.1 percent, are putting pressure for higher rents in the Conejo Valley, DeGrinis added. – Carol Lawrence
REAL ESTATE QUARTERLY: Tenant Migration Slows, But Investors Flock to 101 Corridor
