Vertical Campus: Next Big OC Office Trend?

SANTA ANA, CA—Properties like the One Broadway Plaza office tower here will revolutionize the look and amenities of offices in Orange County, Bob Duncan, Jr., CCIM, senior development partner with Caribou Industries, tells GlobeSt.com. Duncan first mentioned the project during RealShare Orange County in August. As GlobeSt.com reported earlier this week, the property is in the early developmental stages in a market that has been undergoing a significant renaissance. We continue our interview with Duncan, where he goes into more detail about the project and where it stands.

GlobeSt.com: Tell us about how the One Broadway Plaza project fits into Santa Ana's renaissance?

Duncan: The biggest challenge of today's developers is to build product to attract and retain talent for employers. The 25- to 40-year-old knowledge worker is a highly sought after, finite group. The Millennial group is bigger than the Baby Boomers, and they have an entirely different attitude about where and how they want to work. We try to concentrate on that attitude.

Millennials must commute less than a half hour, and their place of work has to be amenity rich. One Broadway Plaza will have a football field on the roof, which is recreational for tenants. It's an amenity for the building, and tenants are looking for that. They need collaborative outdoor spaces. Rather than tenants having to go outside the building for these, we can provide it onsite. They don't have to do it at nights or during weekends at their house.

The flexibility of the space is important. One Broadway Plaza will be 37 stories (50 stories in actual height), 493 feet tall with no columns. That allows for completely clear space that maximizes the productivity of the floor. We're designing the “living office” for some of these potential tenants. It takes in technology, light, enhanced productivity, just with no walls. We really maximize the efficiency and provide the level of productivity within the space.

GlobeSt.com: What other unique features will this vertical campus have?

Duncan: It's also sustainable. We've all heard about low-flow toilets and energy-efficient lighting—been there, done that. The future of sustainability lies in big data. There's a case study about a landlord in New York who turned on his chillers to cool his building down at 5:30 a.m. and turned the off at 6 p.m. But after measuring every piece of data, including the occupancy load, where people are occupying the space, the weather, the season, the orientation of the building to the sun, he determined he could move his start time from 5:30 to 6:15. This saved him almost 8% of energy. When monetized, that added $30 million to his bottom line. That type of system is being installed at One Broadway Plaza. It will be the most sustainable building in Orange County history.

GlobeSt.com: Where are you with the project, and how much will it cost to build?

Duncan: We can't talk about construction costs right now because we're still in the early stages. It's a construction site today, and a lot of substructure has been put into place, with millions of dollars spent prior to us breaking ground on the superstructure of the office project and the garage. We plan to break ground in the first quarter of 2015, and we're at least 50% preleased. We anticipate between 24 and 28 months of construction.