Grubb Ellis Co

Two of the nation's largest commercial real estate brokerage firms, Los Angeles-based CB Richard Ellis Services Inc. and Grubb & Ellis Co. of New York, reportedly are in merger negotiations as the industry struggles to deal with a slump in commercial property leasing and sales. Talk of a potential merger emerged last week after Grubb & Ellis announced that a group, headed by board member C. Michael Kojaian, would inject $15.

Grubb & Ellis Co., after coming close to bankruptcy in recent years, is riding the real estate boom to prosperity and has designs to expand globally. "We need to be international," Chairman and Chief Executive Neil Young told the Bloomberg Forum on Monday. "It's a top priority." Real estate services companies like Northbrook, Ill.-based Grubb & Ellis are for the first time expanding overseas as more U.S. corporations grow internationally and need sites scouted and leases negotiated.

It's tough out there in the commercial real estate trenches, especially now that real estate is slumping. Times are so tough, in fact, that big commercial brokerage Grubb & Ellis Co. is privately accusing its even larger competitor, Coldwell Banker Commercial Real Estate, of trying to exploit Grubb & Ellis' financial woes in order to hijack Grubb & Ellis clients.

It was only a year ago that the owners of many empty and run-down downtown buildings across the country were leasing and selling space at top dollar to rapidly expanding telecommunication firms. But the hard times that have hit telecommunication businesses have caught many landlords with too much supply and little if any demand.

Every year about this time a deluge of economic statistics pours from government, the banks and the universities. In Orange County those statistics are often framed in superlatives: The most expensive houses, the most new jobs, the lowest unemployment. For a place that, until recently, was just another suburb of Los Angeles, Orange County has become an economic power in its own right.

The newly named leasing agent for problem-plagued North Coast Executive Center in Oxnard hopes to attract tenants by creating office suites as small as 1,200 square feet. The strategy will be carried out even though the building has been placed on the auction block, said Thad W. Seligman, senior vice president and district manager in Oxnard for Grubb & Ellis Commercial Real Estate Services.

American Savings Bank owns and leases a lot of office space statewide--about 2.8 million square feet altogether. The state's fifth-largest thrift has 169 branches, a large administration complex in Stockton and a two-building headquarters complex in Irvine. And its constant adding, consolidating and selling of office space gave it headaches because it had to hire local brokers to help.

In an industry traditionally so secretive that brokers have been known to lock up their Rolodexes at night, executives at a Northern California company called LoopNet considered it quite a coup last month when Grubb & Ellis, one of the country's largest commercial real estate brokerages, chose it to market property listings on the very public Internet.

In a further sign of weakness in commercial real estate markets nationwide, San Francisco-based Grubb & Ellis, the nation's largest commercial brokerage, said Friday that it is closing five of its 176 offices nationwide, reducing the size of others and laying off 75 of 1,700 employees. The steps are expected to save $7 million this year and $11.5 million in 1991.

Grubb & Ellis Co. said Tuesday that it has acquired the residential brokerage subsidiary of Mission Viejo Co. in a deal involving cash and notes. Terms were not disclosed. The acquisition gives Grubb & Ellis' regional residential brokerage division 12 offices and 350 agents in Orange and San Diego counties. Mission Viejo Realty had two offices and 75 agents in Mission Viejo. Mission Viejo Realty's name will be changed to Mission Viejo Realty/Grubb & Ellis. Milton E.