Costa Mesa-based Apria Healthcare plans to move its headquarters to Lake Forest in December.
The company, which provides home medical equipment and services such as respiratory therapy, is moving from three buildings at its current 112,000-square-foot Harbor Gateway facility to two adjacent buildings totaling 100,000 square feet in Lake Forest’s Pacific Commercentre.
“The lease (in Costa Mesa) was up,” said Philip Carter, Apria’s chief executive. “The landlord wouldn’t agree to a rent structure that was acceptable.”
Carter said Apria would have preferred to stay in Costa Mesa, but “had no choice” and found the rent in Lake Forest “reasonable.”
Paul Freeman, a spokesman for Apria’s current landlord C.J. Segerstrom & Sons, called the company a good tenant and wished it well.
“They were in a mode of downsizing and didn’t need all the space they had occupied,” said Freeman, adding the company doesn’t expect the space to be empty for long. “Most of Harbor Gateway is filled up and we had no other space to offer them.”
Carter called the difference in space between Costa Mesa and Lake Forest “insignificant.” Still, Apria has gone from six buildings in Costa Mesa when Carter joined in 1998 to half that today, he said.
With about 480 OC employees, Apria’s move stands to make it one of the larger companies based in Lake Forest. Other companies that call Lake Forest home are Beech Street Corp., which employs about 400, and Western Digital Corp., which moved its headquarters and 780 workers there from Irvine in November.
Scott Garmon and Bob Griffith of Cushman & Wakefield brokered the Lake Forest lease. Gale & Wentworth California LLC and Bixby Land Co. developed the Pacific Commercentre.
The first wave of Apria workers,those in information systems,are set to move to Lake Forest in October, Carter said. Employees first learned of the move about seven months ago, he said. The company has lost “less than a handful of people” as a result, he said.
“Employees have overwhelmingly accepted the move,” Carter said.
Earlier this month, Apria’s biggest shareholder, La Jolla-based Relational Investors LLC, sold the majority of its stake in the company for about $100 million.
Apria’s chairman, Ralph Whitworth, is a principal and managing member of Relational Investors, which invests in troubled companies and forces changes in management. OC businessman George Argyros is a significant investor in the company.
Apria is one of OC’s largest public companies, with a market value of more than $1 billion as of last week and revenue of $940 million last year. n
