Los Angeles-based mutual fund manager Capital Group Cos. is in the early stages of moving a major part of its operations from Brea to Irvine.
Capital Group, which runs the American Funds group of about 30 mutual funds, is moving some 2,000 jobs from Brea to Irvine, where it plans to hire as many as 1,000 more people.
“Hiring really good people is a challenge in this environment,” said John Phelan, executive vice president for American Funds Service Co., a division of the company. “But there are a lot of good people here in this area.”
About 400 Capital Group workers already have made the move south, taking up temporary office space in Irvine while construction on the company’s 650,000-square-foot campus continues.
Last quarter, Capital Group signed a multiyear lease for two buildings at Discover Business Center, a new low-rise office development by The Irvine Company in the Irvine Spectrum.
The leases total about 99,000 square feet of space, making it by far the largest South County office lease in the third quarter, according to brokers.
The company also rents space at another three Irvine Co. buildings in the area.
Capital Group considers the Discovery Business Center buildings “temporary space,” said Bryan Lewis, the company’s head of corporate facilities.
“Our goal is to get close to everyone on the campus,” he said.
About a year from now, Capital Group expects to house nearly all of its Orange County workers in what will be one the area’s larger office campuses. The cost of the Irvine complex is expected to be more than $200 million.
The campus lags only that of chipmaker Broadcom Corp., which is building a 700,000-square-foot University Research Park campus.
Capital Group’s buildings broke ground about a year ago at Irvine Center Drive and Sand Canyon Avenue and should open next September.
Most of those moving from Brea work in customer service, accounting and information technology. The company plans to hire up to 1,000 more for the Irvine office in the next few years, according to Phelan.
Original plans for the 34-acre campus were for five three-story buildings. A sixth 80,000-square-foot building was proposed at the time the development was announced.
That sixth building already is needed and is under construction, Lewis said.
Capital Group bought the land for its campus from the Irvine Co. earlier this decade.
“The planning (for the campus) began almost 10 years ago,” Lewis said. “We wanted to be where we thought the labor pool was going to be. Being further south made more sense.”
The campus is designed with workers in mind, Phelan said.
“We planned this project in a different way than normal,” he said. “We see the campus as a small town.”
The design calls for buildings around 60% open land, according to Lewis. Managers will have offices in the center of the floors. Other employees will get the window seats, he said.
New York architectural firm Pei Cobb Freed & Partners LLP is working on the project with Irvine-based LPA Inc. San Francisco’s Hathaway Dinwiddie Construction Co. is the general contractor.
The campus will be the largest of Capital Group’s 20 offices. The 75-year-old company employs about 8,000 people in all. Nearly 2,000 people have been hired in the past five years.
There’s no plan on tap to move the company’s headquarters to Irvine, Phelan said.
Capital Group also has smaller offices in downtown Los Angeles and on the Westside. A disaster recovery center is planned for Long Beach.
A small office will remain in Brea after the move. The company now rents about 370,000 square feet of space in Brea in five buildings. Equity Office Properties Trust is the landlord for a majority of the space.
With $750 billion in funds under management, Capital Group’s American Funds is the third-largest mutual fund operator, behind FMR Corp.’s Fidelity Investments and Vanguard Group Inc.
Capital Group also manages money for retirement plans for corporations, governments and other institutional investors. In all, the company has about $1 trillion in assets under management.
