12 Acres Sell at Valencia Commerce Center

LOS ANGELES—Logix Federal Credit Union has purchased 12 acres of land at Gateway V in the Valencia Commerce Center to build a new headquarters office. The new office will relocate Logix from its current Burbank headquarters, which the company has occupied for 27 years. With delivery scheduled in 2018, the new office will relocate the firm's 400 employees to Santa Clarita while providing significant opportunity for future expansion.

“Gateway V is a development that we have been marketing to developers and users,” Craig Peters, EVP at CBRE tells GlobeSt.com. “We have been planning to develop a number of different buildings on portions of the property. We were really fortunate to get an ideal user in Logix to bring their corporate headquarters up to Santa Clarita Valley.” Peters represented the seller, LNR Gateway V, in the transaction, along with his colleague EVP Doug Sonderegger.

Built and designed by St. Louis-based NewGround, the new 170,000-square-foot headquarters has already broken ground. Logix was looking for a new space, and approached the sales team about the location. Had Logix not inquired, the ownership would have built a speculative industrial building on the land site. “We have some sites that we plan to build on a speculative basis and others that are for-sale. We will have three other spec buildings,” says Peters. “They are all going to be state-of-the-art, class-A industrial buildings, and they will range from 61,000 to 205,000 square feet and will be offered for-sale or for-lease.” There are currently 250,000 square feet worth of speculative buildings that will be built later this year.

However, not all of the construction is speculative. Peters says that they have several other parcels under contract, although he was not at liberty to make any announcements. The ample interest is not surprising when considering the lack of developable space, not only in the Santa Clarita Valley, but in the Southern California market in general. “There is a real lack of supply for both entitled land sites as well as class-A  industrial buildings,” says Peters. “That supply-demand imbalance has created a lot of activity for these properties. The industrial vacancy is below 2% and an office class-A vacancy is below 7%, and then you have very few parcels, really throughout Southern California, that are deliverable. It continues to be a supply and demand imbalance that is sending quite a few companies to the Santa Clarita Valley where there still are a few options available.”

The available land in the Santa Clarita market attracts home developers as well as office and industrial development. Five Knolls, a new 247-acre master planned community, is springing up in the market, from an amalgam of single-family developers, including Brookfield Residential. The growing employment centers, like Gateway V, helped attract development of the master planned community.