Rancho Santa Margarita-based medical device maker Applied Medical Resources Corp. has bought the largest office building in its hometown for its growing operations.
The privately held company recently completed the purchase of 29947 Avenida De Las Banderas, a 300,000-square-foot office on 24.5 acres a few blocks from its headquarters.
The two-story building, which includes about 60,000 square feet of industrial space along with offices, sold for about $37 million, according to CoStar records. The buy is among the priciest commercial real estate deals in South Orange County this year.
An affiliate of Cox Communications Inc. sold the office, according to property records. The building, which sits near the Foothill (241) Toll Road, has long served as a major operations center for the Atlanta-based telecommunications company.
Jobs
Cox last year announced plans to consolidate a number of its Southern California call centers, resulting in layoffs and relocations from the Rancho Santa Margarita office.
Cox is relocating its remaining local operations to Foothill Ranch, where it recently signed a lease for 20 Icon, a 105,000 square foot building owned by Aliso Viejo-based CT Realty.
Phone calls last week to executives from both companies weren’t returned.
Applied Medical is the largest private employer in Rancho Santa Margarita, and Cox is the second largest, according to the city’s website. Applied had nearly 2,150 workers in OC last year, and Cox employed an estimated 900 here, according to Business Journal data.
Applied also is Orange County’s second largest-medical device maker by employee base, trailing only Irvine-based Edwards Lifesciences Inc. It has been on a hiring surge in the past few years. It had about 1,200 employees here in 2011, when it took in about $250 million in annual sales.
It now has close to $450 million in annual sales and is OC’s 36th largest private company by revenue, according to the Business Journal’s recent listing of the area’s biggest privately held companies.
Sales were up about 8% from year-earlier levels, the company reported last month.
Applied makes a range of medical devices, including ones used in laparoscopic surgeries, as well as catheters, clamps, stents and guide wires. It competes with Johnson & Johnson of New Brunswick, N.J., and Covidien Ltd., which is based in Bermuda but operates from Massachusetts.
Low Profile
The company has kept a relatively low profile over the past two years, since it thwarted an investor’s desire to cash out of the company via an initial public offering.
In 2011, Institutional Venture Partners, a late-stage venture capital firm based in Menlo Park that previously had a 20% stake in the company, pushed Applied Medical to go public, resulting in the company filing a registration statement for the proposed IPO with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Applied resisted the investor’s overtures, and by mid-2013 the IPO plans were withdrawn. The device maker is no longer listed as a portfolio company of Institutional Venture Partners, according to the VC firm’s website.
The purchase of the 300,000-square-foot Cox building marks Applied’s first reported property acquisition in several years. Its last announced deal was in 2011, when it paid about $21 million for a 125,800-square-foot industrial facility on Avenida De Las Banderas.
The company owns all of its facilities in Orange County, including its main headquarters on Avenida Empresa in Rancho Santa Margarita. That building runs about 96,000 square feet.
Its IPO filings indicated that it owned a mix of 15 local manufacturing and production and research and development facilities and offices for sales and administration as recently as 2011. The buildings totaled a little more than 800,000 square feet, according to the IPO filing.
Distribution
Much of the company’s space is in Rancho Santa Margarita, although its principal distribution warehouse facility is a 252,000-square-foot building in Irvine that’s part of a second campus.
The company used a $315 million credit facility with Citibank to fund the purchase of the Cox building, according to CoStar records.
Applied’s purchase of the office is the second notable real estate transaction involving a local medical device maker in the past month.
MicroVention Inc., a Tustin-based maker of coils and other devices used for treating strokes and other diseases of the brain’s blood vessels, broke ground in June on a new headquarters at the Summit Office Campus in Aliso Viejo.
The 205,000-square-foot building is being developed by Aliso Viejo-based Parker Properties and is scheduled to open in 2017.
The company plans to invest more than $100 million in the facility. It paid about $15.4 million for the nearly five acres where the office will be built according to CoStar records.
More than 800 workers will be based in the new building. MicroVention is OC’s fifth largest medical device maker by employee count.