Orange Center Tower in the Platinum Triangle has sold for roughly $63 million, handing Lincoln Property Company a paper loss of about $29.5 million compared with its pre-pandemic purchase price. The 14-story, 282,000-square-foot office tower’s new valuation is a blunt reminder that Orange County’s office recovery has plenty of fine print.
The late-June sale works out to approximately $220 per square foot, compared with nearly $330 per square foot when Lincoln bought the property in 2017. The Real Deal reported that Parke Miller signed the deed and that the buying entity is connected to investors Danny Sooferian and Ramin Saghian.
A Major Orange Office Tower Takes A Major Haircut
Orange Center Tower is a Class A building at 500 North State College Boulevard, across from Angel Stadium and near the 5, 22 and 57 freeways. The property website describes the tower as a 282,000-square-foot office building with recent lobby, parking garage and outdoor-space improvements.
Based solely on the reported purchase and sale prices, Lincoln’s investment declined by about 31.9% before accounting for rental income, renovations, financing, taxes or transaction costs. That makes the deal less a verdict on one building than another data point in the ongoing repricing of large suburban office assets.
Orange County Office Data Shows An Uneven Recovery
Orange County’s office market is not uniformly collapsing. Kidder Mathews reported a 10.9% direct vacancy rate in the second quarter, down from 12% a year earlier, along with 54,420 square feet of positive net absorption.
But the brighter countywide numbers conceal stress among higher-end buildings. Class A offices had a 15.9% direct vacancy rate and a 21.9% availability rate in Kidder Mathews’ second-quarter breakdown, while CBRE measured overall Orange County vacancy at 13.3% and reported negative net absorption of 117,000 square feet.
Buyers Are Sorting Offices Into Winners And Conversions
The market’s next phase appears to be less about a broad office comeback and more about separating buildings with durable tenants and locations from properties that need a new use. CoStar recently highlighted a Santa Ana creative-office campus converted into a logistics and research facility, an example of how older commercial space can be repositioned when traditional office demand falls short.
Orange Center Tower remains an office property, and the transaction reporting does not identify a redevelopment plan for the building. Still, the $63 million sale puts a hard number on what investors may pay for a sizable Orange County tower in a market where rents and occupancy are improving overall, but the return-to-office rebound has not restored every asset’s former value.
