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Alcon Takes All of Former WD Campus

Eyecare company Alcon Research Ltd. has inked a deal to move its local operations from Irvine to a Lake Forest office complex that previously held the headquarters of Western Digital Corp.

Alcon, which employs more than 800 workers in Orange County, plans to move early next year to the Serrano Creek Center, a 12-acre office campus on Lake Forest Drive, according to area brokers and data from market tracker CoStar Group Inc.

The three-building property, located near the 241 Transportation Corridor, was last used by disk drive maker Western Digital, which moved its headquarters to the Park Place campus in Irvine in 2010.

The three Lake Forest buildings total about 184,500 square feet. Alcon’s lease for the entire complex represents the largest office deal in OC in terms of square footage so far this year, according to brokerage data.

Alton Address

Alcon’s local operations currently are based in a nearly 190,000-square-foot building on Alton Parkway in the Irvine Spectrum.

Terms of the lease, said to run more than 10 years, were not disclosed. Space at the property had been listed for lease at monthly rents of about $1.15 per square foot, triple-net, according to brokerage data from CBRE Group Inc. and Orion Property Partners, who had the listing for the property.

Alcon ranks as OC’s fifth-largest medical device maker, based on local employees. It’s added about 300 local positions over the past decade.

Its Irvine operations are used to manufacture eye-related surgical equipment, and the company’s current Alton Parkway facilities contain “some of the most sophisticated ophthalmic research and manufacturing activities in the world,” according to Alcon’s website.

More than 45,000 ophthalmic systems have been manufactured at the Irvine facility over the past 20 years, according to Alcon. Products include the Infiniti Vision System, which is used in in cataract lens removal.

The company is a unit of Switzerland-based healthcare giant Novartis AG, which bought Alcon for $12.9 billion from another Swiss company in 2010.

Alcon is OC’s 11th-largest foreign-owned company by employee count, according to Business Journal records.

Alcon made local headlines in its 2010 buy of Aliso Viejo-based startup LenSx Laser Inc. for a reported $362 million. LenSx makes lasers used to remove cataracts.

The move to Lake Forest should make Alcon that city’s third-largest employer, behind Panasonic Avionics Corp., a maker of inflight entertainment systems that has its headquarters a few blocks away from Alcon’s new digs, and sunglasses maker Oakley Inc., which is based in the Foothill Ranch section of the city.

Upgrades

Alcon’s move to the former Western Digital headquarters follows upgrades there.

TA Associates Realty, the Boston-based owner of the property, has made substantial investments in the Serrano Creek Center campus since Western Digital left, according to brokers.

The campus includes a trio of two-story buildings. One is a 74,382-square-foot building, and the other two total 55,050 square feet each.

The owner offered the empty property for sale at an asking price of $32.3 million last September.

It’s not known whether TA Associates plans to relist the campus for sale now that it has a tenant for the entire property.

On the Market

Several other similar-sized buildings in Lake Forest, including those leased to Panasonic Avionics, are currently being marketed for sale by their owners.

Jeff Carr and Gregg Haly, with the Newport Beach office of CBRE, represented TA Associates in the lease, along with Bob Thagard of Irvine-based Orion Property Partners.

Jeff Ingham, with the Irvine office of Jones Lang LaSalle Inc., represented Alcon in the lease.

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Mark Mueller
Mark Mueller
Mark is the Editor-in-Chief of the Orange County Business Journal, one of the premier regional business newspapers in the country. He’s the fifth person to hold the editor’s position in the paper’s long history. He oversees a staff of about 15 people. The OCBJ is considered a must-read for area business executives. The print edition of the paper is the primary source of local news for most of the Business Journal’s subscribers, which includes most of OC’s major corporate and community players. Mark’s been with the paper since 2005, and long served as the real estate reporter for the paper, breaking hundreds of commercial and residential real estate stories. He took on the editor’s position in 2018.
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