Another lure is the proximity of John Wayne Airport. Many senior FDIC officials now at IndyMac are commuting weekly from homes in the Washington and Dallas areas.
The agency also is familiar with Orange County, which was home to some of the most controversial savings and loans that collapsed in an earlier financial crisis in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The Resolution Trust Corp., an FDIC spinoff that disposed of hundreds of billions of dollars in S&L assets, operated an office in Costa Mesa that moved to Newport Beach before closing in 1996. The FDIC also had offices in Irvine throughout most of the 1990s.
A large lease would be good news for Orange County office landlords, who have seen their market veer from hot to cold in recent years. Times were so good during the housing boom that commercial landlords were able to steadily raise rents as vacancy rates fell. Then the housing market peaked and the subprime lenders with huge operations closed up shop, pouring office space back on the market just as new buildings totaling more than 2 million square feet were coming on line.
"Landlords, for the most part, are in a deal-making mood," said Kurt Strasmann, head of Orange County operations for real estate brokerage Grubb & Ellis. "They are going to do what it takes to make transactions."
Real estate sources said one potential site for the FDIC offices was twin 15-story towers completed this year in the Irvine Spectrum shopping, office and housing development near the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater.
Developed by the county's largest landlord, Irvine Co., the marble-clad towers at 20 and 40 Pacifica have more than 300,000 square feet of space each.
The 20 Pacifica tower is 33% rented, while 40 Pacifica remains empty, according to real estate data provider CoStar Group Inc. Marketing materials for the buildings promote on-site auto detailing and a nearby golf club.
The abundance of office space and laid-off financial workers makes Orange County a perfect location for the FDIC, said William J. Popejoy, a former S&L and Freddie Mac executive who became the county's chief executive after it filed for bankruptcy protection in 1994.
Office space might be cheaper in, say, Phoenix or the Inland Empire, Popejoy said, but those locations lack the financial workforce that has boosted Orange County's reputation as a major, if sometimes aggressive, hub for lending.
"Orange County has had much more of a financial frontier mentality," he said. "It sort of creates a magnetism for the new thing -- and the new thing starting in the late 1990s was the go-go real estate market.
"Of course, that's good when the economic tide is rising, and not so good when it's going out."
The banking-industry problems that began with mortgages and home-builder loans are spreading to commercial real estate and business loans -- the core products for commercial banks, said RBC Capital Markets bank analyst Joe Morford.
"We don't think there's any way to avert more bank failures," he said.
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scott.reckard@latimes.com
roger.vincent@latimes.com
