The deal represents one of the top 10 commercial property sales of 2010 on the South Coast and is the largest commercial sale of the year in Carpinteria, Celmayster notes.
Lynda.com, which Celmayster has represented from the outset in all of its leasing since the company migrated north into Santa Barbara County, began moving its headquarters from Ventura to Carpinteria last year adding 73 jobs since April 2009 and leasing nearly 60,000 square feet of office and research and development space in Carpinteria.
Acquisition of the property at 6410 Cindy Lane enables lynda.com to better plan its current growth and future expansion needs while securing its future real estate needs in Carpinteria, Celmayster says. According to Lynda Weinman, co-founder of lynda.com, the acquisition creates a consolidated campus for the company with expanded, customized work space.
Lynda.com has not announced detailed plans for the property, but Hayes Commercial says that the company will most likely remodel the office building for use as offices, capitalizing on the ocean views, and update the warehouse building for a live-action recording studio for its online training videos. The firm is one of only 22 companies that occupy more than 50,000 square feet of office space on the South Coast.
Terms of the sale were not disclosed, but the property was listed at an asking price of $6 million. The seller was represented by Bob Tuler, Paul Gamberdella and Gene Deering of Radius Group, along with Michael Slater and Tom Dwyer of CB Richard Ellis.
The buildings at 6410 Cindy Lane were built in the mid-1970s and housed corporate offices for Sambo’s Restaurants, which at the time was a NYSE-traded company with the largest chain of company-owned restaurants in the world. In 1987, the Salvation Army purchased the property and adapted the office building for use as a rehabilitation facility, while using the warehouse building for donation processing. After closing the rehabilitation facility and scaling back its use of the warehouse, and the Salvation Army put the property on the market for sale one year ago.