By Eric Engelbert
An Office Park Is Becoming a Neighborhood
The Irvine Business Complex sits on the western edge of Irvine, tucked between the 405 Freeway, the 55 Freeway, San Diego Creek, and the boundary with Costa Mesa and Newport Beach. For decades it was a collection of low-rise office buildings, warehouses, and industrial parks that most Irvine residents drove past without much thought. That is changing fast.
The City of Irvine has rezoned the IBC to allow up to 15,000 new homes, making it the second-largest housing growth area in the city's updated General Plan. Developers have taken notice. Projects are being submitted, approved, and in some cases already torn down and rebuilt. The transformation of the Irvine Business Complex is one of the largest and least-discussed housing stories in Orange County.
Where the IBC Came From
The Irvine Business Complex was not always called that. When the Irvine Company and architect William Pereira mapped out the city in the late 1960s alongside the UC Irvine campus, they designated the western edge as an industrial district called the Irvine Industrial Complex West. Warehouses, light manufacturing, and corporate campuses filled the area through the 1970s.
As the technology economy grew in the 1980s and 1990s, manufacturing faded and office parks took over. The area rebranded as the Irvine Business Complex. By 2000 it was a dense employment hub home to dozens of regional headquarters, medical offices, and tech firms clustered around John Wayne Airport.
Then the housing math changed. Irvine's home prices climbed. State mandates required cities to plan for more units. And suddenly those aging office buildings sitting on flat, well-located, freeway-adjacent land looked like something else entirely to developers and investors.
In 1992 the city first allowed residential uses in the IBC, capping it at 3,896 units. The General Plan update raised that cap to 15,000 units. As of mid-2026, about 12,341 units already exist in the IBC, 2,010 more are under construction, and 1,468 have been approved and are waiting to break ground.
What the IBC Looks Like Today
The IBC covers roughly 2,700 acres. It runs along the western city limit from Campus Drive in the south up to the city boundary near the 405/55 interchange. The San Joaquin Marsh and San Diego Creek form a natural eastern border, separating the IBC from the rest of Irvine. The 405 bisects the district, and John Wayne Airport sits just to the south.
What makes the IBC attractive to developers is not just the land. It is the location. Residents would live within a short drive of every major employment center in Orange County, with freeway access in multiple directions, transit options expanding, and retail and services already nearby. The city has also required minimum densities of 50 dwelling units per acre for new residential projects in the IBC, pushing development vertical rather than horizontal.
Every large project in the IBC must include at least 15% affordable housing under Irvine's inclusionary zoning policy, adopted in 2003. That means thousands of below-market units will be built alongside the market-rate homes as the district fills in.
Spotlight: Lennar and the Von Karman Campus
The single biggest story in the IBC right now sits at the northwest corner of Alton Parkway and Von Karman Avenue, where a 25-acre office campus built in 1988 is being demolished and rebuilt as 426 new homes. The design aesthetic in the architectural renderings is farmhouse-inspired, a deliberate contrast to the commercial character of the surrounding area. No architect of record has been publicly named as of this writing.
The story behind this project is almost as interesting as the project itself. The campus, which IRA Capital branded the Von Karman Creative Campus, was originally sold by EQ Office, a Chicago unit of New York-based Blackstone. IRA Capital, an Irvine-based private equity firm co-founded by Mohannad Malas and Amer F. Kasm in 2010, purchased it in 2023 alongside Boston-based Foxfield as a 50-50 partner for $102.4 million. At the time, Kasm was direct about the play: "The value of this property is in the land."
What followed was a pivot from initial industrial redevelopment plans to housing, pushed along in part by the city of Irvine as it faced mounting state housing mandates. The city conditionally offered to buy the site for more than $300 million as a backstop if residential development failed to materialize, a backstop that helped ensure a housing outcome. IRA secured full residential entitlements from the Irvine Planning Commission in the third quarter of 2025 and also paid the city $6.7 million in community park in-lieu fees and $7.2 million in affordable housing in-lieu fees as part of the approval.
In January 2026, IRA and Foxfield sold to a joint venture of TPG Angelo Gordon and Essential Housing Asset Management, an affiliate of Miami-based homebuilder Lennar, for $232.1 million, more than double what they paid three years earlier. TPG Angelo Gordon manages more than $220 billion in assets after TPG acquired Angelo Gordon in 2023 for $2.7 billion. Lennar, led by CEO Stuart Miller, is one of the largest homebuilders in the United States. Demolition began almost immediately after closing.
Von Karman: The Full Money Trail
• Address: 16775 Von Karman Avenue, Irvine
• Site size: 25.4 acres | 433,000 sq ft of office (9 buildings, built 1988)
• 2023 sale: Blackstone (via EQ Office) sold to IRA Capital + Foxfield for $102.4 million
• City in-lieu fees paid: $6.7M (parks) + $7.2M (affordable housing)
• Entitlements approved: Q3 2025, Irvine Planning Commission
• 2026 sale: IRA Capital + Foxfield sold to TPG Angelo Gordon + Lennar for $232.1 million ($536/sq ft | $9.1M/acre)
• Units: 426 for-sale homes (detached, duets, townhomes, stacked flats)
• Architecture: Farmhouse-inspired design aesthetic
• Estimated unit prices: $1.2 million to $1.55 million per unit
• Estimated total sellout: $500 million to $660 million
• Status: Demolition underway; construction imminent as of mid-2026
Who Are the Players?
IRA Capital was founded in 2010 by Mohannad Malas and Amer F. Kasm and is headquartered in Irvine at 3121 Michelson Drive. The firm has acquired over 7 million square feet of property across 30 states, valued at more than $4 billion. Though primarily known for healthcare and medical real estate, the Von Karman play showed the firm's ability to identify and execute a high-value land conversion. IRA walked away from the sale having more than doubled its money in three years.
Foxfield is a Boston-based real estate firm that partnered with IRA Capital as a 50-50 co-owner of the Von Karman campus. Foxfield has not been widely quoted in coverage of the project but confirmed the sale details alongside IRA.
TPG Angelo Gordon is one of the largest alternative investment firms in the world. Angelo Gordon was acquired by TPG in a $2.7 billion cash and equity transaction in 2023. The combined organization manages more than $220 billion in assets, with significant exposure to real estate debt and equity strategies. Their Essential Housing Fund III is specifically structured to remove raw land from homebuilder balance sheets, positioning Lennar to build without carrying land on its books.
Lennar is one of the largest homebuilders in the United States, headquartered in Miami and led by CEO Stuart Miller. Lennar builds tens of thousands of homes per year across the country and has a substantial Orange County presence. Their involvement as the builder on this project means construction timelines will likely be executed efficiently once demolition is complete.
Other Active Projects in the IBC
The Von Karman project is the largest and most advanced, but it is not the only one. The Martin Street Residential Project proposes demolishing 78,800 square feet of existing industrial buildings on a 3.72-acre site and replacing them with 170 multi-family apartments. It is one of several smaller infill projects threading between the existing office and industrial uses as the district gradually shifts.
The city's development map shows a pipeline of projects at various stages, from early application through construction. Taken together, they represent the IBC slowly but systematically converting from a place you go to work to a place where people live, work, shop, and spend time.
What This Means for the Irvine Real Estate Market
The IBC buildout will add meaningful supply to the Irvine market over the next decade. That matters because Irvine has consistently been one of the most supply-constrained cities in Orange County despite its size. New for-sale product in the IBC, particularly at price points below the luxury tier, could give buyers options they have not had in years.
The location also changes the calculus for buyers who work in the area. Living in the IBC puts you within a short commute of John Wayne Airport, South Coast Plaza, Newport Center, and the major office corridors along Jamboree and MacArthur. For buyers who currently live in Irvine and commute to those areas, or who commute into Irvine from elsewhere, IBC housing is worth watching closely.
The city has argued, persuasively, that building housing near jobs actually reduces traffic rather than increasing it. People who live close to where they work drive fewer miles. For a city bisected by one of the most congested freeways in California, that argument carries real weight.
How the Price More Than Doubled in Three Years
When IRA Capital and Foxfield bought the Von Karman campus in 2023 for $102.4 million, they were not paying for an office building. They were paying for what the land could become. Amer Kasm said it plainly at the time: "The value of this property is in the land."
What followed was a strategy known in the industry as entitlement arbitrage. The physical land did not change. What changed was its legal use. Over 36 months, IRA and Foxfield did three things: they de-tenanted all nine office buildings, repositioned the property, and ran the full city entitlement process to convert the zoning from commercial office to residential. In the third quarter of 2025, the Irvine Planning Commission approved a Master Plan, Park Plan, and Vesting Tentative Tract Map for 426 for-sale homes. At that moment, the land stopped being worth what vacant post-pandemic office space is worth and started being worth what a fully approved, shovel-ready residential development in one of the most desirable cities in California is worth.
The math is not complicated. At $1.2 million to $1.55 million per unit and 426 units, the finished homes represent $500 million to $660 million in gross revenue for Lennar. A builder will pay a premium to acquire a site where all the government approval risk has already been taken out of the deal. That premium is the reward for the three years IRA spent navigating the planning process.
The city of Irvine even confirmed this value implicitly. Officials conditionally offered to buy the site themselves for more than $300 million as a backstop if housing development fell through. That offer essentially put a floor on the value and signaled to the market exactly what entitled residential land in Irvine was worth. IRA and Foxfield's $130 million profit, before taxes and fees, was earned by doing the entitlement work that transformed the land's permitted use. It is a legitimate business model and in this case executed efficiently.
What This Means for Irvine's Tax Base
The fiscal picture for Irvine is genuinely positive, with one notable nuance worth understanding.
The upfront financial benefit to the city is already locked in. IRA Capital paid Irvine $6.7 million in community park in-lieu fees and $7.2 million in affordable housing in-lieu fees as part of the entitlement approval. That is $13.9 million deposited into city funds before a single home is built.
On an ongoing basis, the 426 homes will generate property tax assessed at their purchase prices. At $1.2 million to $1.55 million per unit, the total assessed value of the community at full sellout could reach $575 million or more. Under California's Proposition 13, that generates a base property tax of roughly $5.75 million per year from the development, before any Mello-Roos or special district assessments that newer Irvine developments typically carry, which can push effective rates above 1.4 percent.
Here is the nuance: Irvine receives one of the lowest shares of property tax revenue of any city in Orange County. Cities like Newport Beach (17.2%), Santa Ana (16.9%), and Huntington Beach (15.4%) capture far more of the property tax dollar than Irvine does. This goes back to the terms of Irvine's 1971 incorporation and the influence of the Irvine Company in shaping how tax revenue was allocated. The city makes up for it through sales tax, hotel occupancy tax, and development fees, which together account for the bulk of locally generated revenue.
Even with a modest property tax share, the ongoing revenue from 426 new households, combined with the $13.9 million in upfront fees, the sales tax generated by those residents spending locally, and the broader increase in property values across the IBC as the district improves, makes this development a meaningful fiscal win for the city. Irvine has spent years trying to attract exactly this kind of dense, high-value residential development to the IBC, and the Von Karman project is the largest and most advanced example of that strategy working.
The Numbers Behind the Transformation
Here is where the Irvine Business Complex stands heading into the second half of 2026:
| Category | Units |
|---|---|
| Existing residential units in IBC | 12,341 |
| Units currently under construction | 2,010 |
| Units approved, not yet built | 1,468 |
| Total General Plan capacity | 15,000 |
| Remaining capacity to be built | ~1,181+ |
Source: City of Irvine Community Development Department. Figures are approximate as of mid-2026.
The IBC is just one part of the development wave reshaping Orange County. See every major project, city by city, on the New Developments in Orange County page.
Explore Homes for Sale in Irvine
If you are watching the IBC or considering a move to Irvine or nearby cities, explore current listings here:
