Donald Bren

The multifamily sector in Southern California has become so arduous and contrived that construction is stuck at historic lows, and any proposal with more than 300 units is “big,” and anything above that is landmark.

Irvine Company, however, works in the thousands. Donald Bren’s market-leading firm is the biggest multifamily owner in California, and its pipeline appears to be as robust as it has ever been — reshaping cities one master plan at a time.

Irvine Company’s 129 million-square-foot portfolio features 65,000 rental units across 125 communities, as well as more than 590 office buildings and 40 retail centers, a coastal resort, three golf courses and five marinas.

That makes Bren perhaps the most formidable force in commercial real estate in the nation’s most populous state.

But the past year for Irvine Company has been defined by leaning even further into more residential density. The development company is repositioning underutilized assets into residential villages, including the transformation of a golf course into a 3,100-home community, and the addition of nearly 2,000 units to the Discovery Park development in Irvine, Calif. (which was a master-planned city built by Irvine Company).

Other big new projects include one calling for up to 2,500 units near the University of California at Irvine; 1,336 apartments at the Tustin Legacy community in Tustin; and 700 units through an office-to-residential plan at Newport Beach’s MacArthur Court.

Irvine Company has also been busy shedding underperforming office assets that no longer fit the long-term vision. The firm made waves last year by officially exiting the Downtown San Diego office market and early this year also ditched an office property in Pasadena in a $98 million deal as it focuses on residential-heavy, master-planned developments.

Irvine Company leased 8.7 million square feet in 2025 across Orange County, Los Angeles, San Diego, Silicon Valley, Chicago and New York, finishing the year with a near 90 percent occupancy rate across its office properties. In January 2026, law firm Gibson Dunn renewed for 361,569 square feet at Irvine Company’s MetLife Building at 200 Park Avenue in Manhattan, joining major tenants such as MetLife and CBRE.