Web Host GlobalCenter Signs 15-Year, $70-Million Lease

GlobalCenter Inc., a Sunnyvale Web hosting company, signed one of the largest leases in Orange County this year--232,000 square feet--as it enters Southern California to service Web sites for its local corporate customers, its broker said Thursday.

The lease, worth about $70 million over 15 years, gives GlobalCenter room in an Irvine building on Jamboree Boulevard for the computer hardware needed to host Web sites, said Kevin Bender, a director of Ensignia/ESG real estate brokerage, which handled the lease.

GlobalCenter could hire up to 100 people for the Irvine operation, he said.

GlobalCenter executives could not be reached for comment late Thursday.

The deal is one of three major Orange County leases that Ensignia has engineered in the past month, Bender said. The leases, valued at a total of $125 million, show the county’s ability to attract or keep major national and international companies, he said.

* FCB Worldwide advertising agency is consolidating its Los Angeles and three Orange County offices into a 100,000-square-foot converted warehouse on Gillette Avenue just north of Main Street in Irvine. The 15-year lease for the company’s regional headquarters is valued at $35 million, Bender said.

* American International Group Inc., one of the world’s largest insurance firms, is moving its Costa Mesa operation to 70,000 square feet north of MacArthur Boulevard west of the Costa Mesa Freeway in Santa Ana. The 10-year deal is worth nearly $20 million, Bender said.

The GlobalCenter and FCB deals are “unique,” he said, because the companies chose to move to Orange County rather than Los Angeles. “GlobalCenter will add an office in Los Angeles later but thought Irvine was a more important market to enter first,” he said.