Three healthcare companies have taken a combined 71,000 square feet of office space in separate deals in Orange and Santa Ana.
The deals, struck in recent months, are:
Healthcare Management Partners, a medical billing company, signed a 10-year lease for 36,000 square feet of space at 1241 E. Dyer Road in Santa Ana for its headquarters.
The company’s new office is more than twice the size of its previous office in Irvine.
Healthcare Management Partners provides billing and collection services for doctors, outpatient surgical and imaging centers.
The company also helps doctors manage their practices, handle accounts payable, bookkeeping, human resources and professional credentialing.
Health Risk Resource Group subleased 19,800 square feet of space for six years at 500 W. City Parkway in Orange.
Health Risk, which is moving from Santa Ana, is part of Principal Financial Group of Des Moines, Iowa.
The company helps health plan operators deal with what it calls “white space”,healthcare costs incurred by patients going to doctors outside their healthcare network.
Kaiser Foundation Health Plan Inc. leased 15,300 square feet of space for five years at the Xerox Centre in Santa Ana.
Oakland-based Kaiser, Orange County’s largest health maintenance organization with more than 370,000 local members, is using the space for a regional sales office.
Kaiser has been busy in OC.
It’s building a $210 million, 150-bed hospital on Sand Canyon Avenue in Irvine that’s set to open late next year. Kaiser also plans to replace its aging hospital on Lakeview Avenue in Anaheim with a 250-bed, $326 million facility that’s being designed.
Lease rates for the deals weren’t disclosed. The county’s average asking rent for top office space is $2.84, according to Grubb & Ellis Co.
The leases played a part in the county’s declining office vacancy rate, which was 6.9% in the third quarter, down from 7.8% six months earlier.
“(With) the office use portion of the medical world that we’re talking about, the dynamics are really the same as any office deal,” Grubb & Ellis’ Tom Taylor said. “Any tenant, whether it’s a medical office, back office or for that matter, any office tenant, is struggling these days to find suitable office space, and at lease rates they’ve been accustomed to after the last five years.”
Taylor and colleague Gary McArdell represented the tenants in the transactions.
