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While others sit on the sidelines, the Irvine Co. is reinvesting
heavily in its premier portfolio and going with a customer-first philosophy
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cleanliness brings to mind a comment Sim had made to me earlier in the day.
"We’re freakish," she had said, in describing the company’s corporate culture. "Freakish good."
Freakish is not often the word used to describe Orange County’s largest landowner. The privately
held company today counts 93,000 acres among its holdings, or, nearly one-fifth of the county’s
entire land area. The company’s portfolio “includes more than 400 office buildings, 35 retail centers,
80 apartment communities, two
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hotels, four marinas and three golf clubs,” according to its website. While there’s nothing freakish about the portfolio, there is a corporate culture that breeds familiarity
from the top down—it’s an attention to detail that borders on obsession.
"We want to define our culture where people are obsessed with customer service to the point were property
management is looking at thousand of service providers instead of the herd mentality that says, as long as
the building looks good, all is okay. Instead, we want them
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wondering, for instance, about the cooling towers and if they're working correctly," says Bill Halford, Irvine Co. Office Properties president.
That’s not always the type attitude that will get you to the top, as you’re scratching and clawing and shrewdly
beating your competition to the punch. But it’s the type of attitude that can keep you there, the kind that
company chairman Donald Bren brought with him when he first bought a share of the company in 1973.
The company’s long been known for keeping business matters close to the vest and for staying, relatively,
out of the public eye—it’s a reflection of the very private Bren, the apotheosis of much of commercial
real
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