CKE downsizes Carpinteria headquarters
CKE Restaurants, the parent company of fast-food chains Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s, is again downsizing the footprint at its Carpinteria headquarters and moving some employees to its Anaheim offices.
CKE’s lease at the building at 6307 Carpinteria Ave. expires in March 2015 and the company is currently negotiating for an extension of a smaller space, a corporate spokesman told the Business Times.
“We are moving a small number of people in key support departments to our Anaheim location to create greater efficiencies and better serve and support our franchisees and company-owned restaurants,” the company said in a statement. “We are not eliminating positions and we are not moving out of California.”
Negotiations for the lease renewal are ongoing, although CKE is only looking to extend through March of 2017, the spokesman said. The executive team will remain in the Carpinteria office for that time, but plans beyond then are not definite, according to the firm.
Carpinteria’s small office market is dependent on a handful of large tenants, including CKE, Radius Commercial Real Estate & Investments noted in its 2013 year-end market report. At that time, CKE occupied about 88,000 square feet, or 20 percent of the office market in the city, according to the report.
Since then, the company has reduced its space by almost 10,000 square feet. CKE officials didn’t say how much space it would occupy with the lease renewal.
CKE has about 120 employees at its headquarters in Carpinteria, CKE executives said two years ago. CEO Andy Puzder has talked in the past of the possibility of moving the company’s headquarters to Texas, where it is aggressively building new restaurants, but has said no such plans are imminent. Last year, private-equity giant Apollo Management sold CKE to an Atlanta firm specializing in restaurant chains for a reported $1.6 billion.
