Financial Center Lease Is Valued at $12.5 Million : Real estate: Donnelley Information Publishing has signed a 7 1/2-year pact for a three-story structure at the Nexus Financial Center.

Donnelley Information Publishing has signed a 7 1/2-year lease valued at $12.5 million for a three-story building at the Nexus Financial Center here.

It is one of the larger leases signed in the county recently, the building’s owner, Chicago’s JMB Realty Corp., said in announcing the deal Tuesday.

Donnelley, a publisher of yellow pages, will immediately begin moving 300 employees from its current Orange County headquarters and sales office in Garden Grove.

As part of the deal, Donnelly will get its own sign on a portion of the building facing the Garden Grove Freeway.

Nexus Financial Center is three buildings on South Parker Street: two three-story buildings and an eight-story tower, with a combined 300,000 square feet of space.

The Donnelley building is at 681 S. Parker St. and has 72,000 square feet.

While the particulars of the deal were not disclosed, brokers say Donnelley got a good deal on the office space.

The county’s commercial real estate business is plagued by millions of square feet of empty space following a building boom that lasted through much of the 1980s. Rents haven’t risen much in the last five years, and landlords are providing such incentives as a year’s free rent to lure tenants.

Consequently, tenants with a compelling reason to move in the midst of the recession are finding bargains. Some unusually large lease deals have been signed in the last year or so. They include the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.’s leasing of seven floors in the Irvine Co.’s Jamboree Center development in Irvine and the Los Angeles law firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher taking five floors in the same building.