Office Market Near Airport Is Perking Up : Real estate: A big tenant has signed a Koll Co. lease for 87,000 square feet. An ever bigger one, the Resolution Trust Corp., is shopping for 200,000 square feet.

IRVINE —  The office market around John Wayne Airport is showing signs of life as a major tenant says it has leased space in an office tower there and an even bigger tenant is also shopping the neighborhood.

Ultrasystems Inc., an Irvine energy company, has signed a lease for 87,000 square feet--about four floors--at a Koll Co. high-rise at 2020 Main St. in Irvine.

Ultrasystems isn’t expected to move in before July because the company has been put on the block by its parent, Oklahoma’s Hadson Corp., and probably won’t be sold until then, Hadson Corp. President J. Michael Adcock said.

Meanwhile, the statewide office of the federal Resolution Trust Corp., now based in Costa Mesa, is scouting up to 200,000 square feet, which would be one of the largest office leases in Orange County history.

The federal agency, which was created to manage and sell off failed thrifts, says it has tentatively picked a Koll Co. high-rise, the former McDonnell Douglas building at 4000 MacArthur Blvd. in Newport Beach, a few blocks from the building Ultrasystems is moving into. The RTC says it may eventually take as many as 11 floors in that building and one next door.

The RTC, which employs 350 people and is still hiring, says it needs more space. It also needs to be near John Wayne Airport because its employees travel frequently.

The Douglas building and an identical Koll building next door can accommodate the RTC’s massive space needs because they have as much as 180,000 square feet empty since Douglas moved out in June, Koll says.

The deals are mostly good news for the Newport Beach-based commercial real estate developer, which has seen the development business slow drastically in the past year while trying to fill up buildings it has already constructed.

Such large leases are unusual even in good times but are especially rare now, when tenants are scarcer.

These deals don’t necessarily signal an increased flow of new tenants, however.

And sometimes they don’t mean a windfall to the landlord either: It’s smart for tenants to move now because rents are dirt-cheap in Orange County’s overbuilt office market. The average building is about 23% vacant, although the influx of new tenants has been stronger around the airport--the county’s “new downtown”--than some other neighborhoods in the last year.

Tenants as large as Ultrasystems and the RTC can also swing enormous reductions in rent and all sorts of fringe benefits from landlords desperate to fill buildings.

While little has been disclosed about the terms of the Ultrasystems deal or the RTC’s leasing requirements, real estate brokers said both deals will almost certainly wind up being on very attractive terms to the tenants.

“There were significant cost savings in the (new lease with Koll),” Adcock said. “But we didn’t want to be moving while we were negotiating a sale.”

The negotiations with Koll were difficult because it was uncertain who would eventually buy Ultrasystems and because Hadson Corp. itself was struggling financially. But Ultrasystems and its brokers, Grubb & Ellis Co., still persuaded Koll to assume payments on the energy company’s existing lease in an older building nearby on Von Karman Avenue in Irvine.

Koll wouldn’t comment on the deal, referring questions to Ultrasystems.

The building Ultrasystems is set to move into is named after its major tenant, Wells Fargo. It is a 16-story, 365,000-square-foot building completed last year, and is about half full.

The building is a joint venture between Koll, Columbia Savings & Loan in Beverly Hills--being operated by federal regulators--and a pension fund for Connecticut teachers, which owns most of the building.

Meanwhile, the RTC says it is close to a sale of its mission-style building near the corner of Harbor and Newport boulevards in Costa Mesa. This means, of course, that the agency will have to vacate the building, with about 100,000 square feet of office space, that had been the headquarters of a failed thrift, Pacific Savings Bank.

The agency is said to be asking more than $10 million for the building but won’t disclose the price or who is buying.