The Orange County Register’s former printing plant in Santa Ana is destined to get bulldozed, making way for a new Amazon “last mile” distribution center in the heart of Orange County.
The online retailer paid nearly $63.2 million on Oct. 19 to buy the 63-year-old building and 16 ½ acres of land along the 5 Freeway, said Jack Haley, a principal with Lee & Associates in Orange and one of the property’s four listing agents.
But Santa Ana real estate developer Michael Harrah, owner of the Register property since 2016, retains ownership of the iconic, orange office building that housed the Register’s newsroom and advertising team since 1986. The now-vacant five-story tower still is up for sale or lease.
The Register newsroom relocated in 2017, leasing a building near the 57 freeway just south of Angel Stadium one year after Digital First Media purchased the newspaper in a bankruptcy auction.
A site plan filed with Santa Ana shows Amazon plans to build a one-story, 112,485-square-foot warehouse, or “delivery station building,” on a now-vacant parcel behind the newspaper’s former office building.
The vacant plot, dubbed Field of Greens, served as cropland for the Second Harvest Food Bank for several years after the Register demolished an apartment building there.
The site plan shows parking, loading and van queuing will occupy the rest of the land. The plan has been approved, said Santa Ana spokesman Paul Eakins.
Amazon has yet to apply for the demolition and building permits needed to move forward. But a fair amount of construction will be needed since the building planned for demolition is attached to the office tower on two floors.
The new warehouse will join one other in Mission Viejo, where Amazon is converting a recreational vehicle storage facility into another “last mile” delivery station.
Harrah once pitched the former Register site to Amazon as a potential second headquarters, dubbed Orange County Silicon City.
While it failed to win consideration in Amazon’s highly publicized HQ2 competition, the land is ideal for an Orange County distribution center, Haley said.
“It’s a lot (of money) for industrialized land today, but it’s 5 Freeway frontage, and they couldn’t get a more central last-mile property,” he said. “In an infill, densely populated market area, they can zip through that part of Orange County to get to their customers. … It checks all the boxes you want to check off.”
Amazon already had been using a portion of the land for parking for the past year.
The last tenant of the Register high-rise office, KDOC TV, moved out sometime last year.
The deal appears to be profitable for Harrah, who reportedly paid about $61 million for the Register’s original 20 acres. He paid $27 million to buy the Register headquarters building in 2014, becoming the newspaper’s landlord. Digital First Media sold Harrah the remaining 14 acres surrounding the office building at the end of March 2016 for $34 million.
The former Santa Ana Register moved to 625 N. Grand Ave. in 1957, after 18 years at Sycamore and 6th Street. The Hoiles family, which had purchased the 115-year-old newspaper in 1935, renamed the publication the Orange County Register during a major newsroom expansion in the 1980s.
The decision by Register owners to sell the property was the latest in a long list of newspaper headquarter sales as print circulation and advertising plummeted over the past 2 1/2 decades.
Harrah, the 6-foot-6, bearded construction worker-turned-real estate tycoon, circulated lofty visions for the sprawling Register site, releasing a plan in 2017 to convert the property into an urban mixed-use development with residential high-rise towers, hotels, office and shopping. The printing press made the site ideal for a global corporate headquarters wanting to publish its own in-house newspaper, he said.
Today, the printing press, which once churned out more than 300,000 copies of the newspaper daily, sits idle.
The Santa Ana Works Center and Amazon plan to partner in holding a job fair for local applicants some time in the future, Eakins said.
