Lake Forest Set to Join Medical Building Spree
By VITA REED
Another medical building is going up, this time in Lake Forest.
The Irvine office of Sacramento-based developer Panattoni Development Co. has started putting up a medical office building on Rancho Parkway South, near the Foothill (241) Toll Road.
Plans call for some 18,000 square feet of space in two stories. The project is within the Foothill Business Park, next to the headquarters of industrial software maker Wonderware Corp., part of Britain’s Invensys PLC.
Grading on the Foothill Ranch Medical Building is set to start in a week or so. The building should be ready for tenants in March.
The project is the latest in a series of medical office projects planned or recently built.
Last year, Costa Mesa-based Boureston Development Inc. finished the Walnut Grove Medical Center, a two-story office building next to Western Medical Center-Anaheim.
Now Boureston is building a 36,000-square-foot medical office on Barranca Parkway in Irvine’s Woodbridge neighborhood.
In Mission Viejo, Mission Hills Medical Center LLC is buying 2.5 acres of land in the masterplanned High Park business complex near Alicia Parkway and Jeronimo Road. Plans call for a two-story, 30,000-square-foot medical building on the site.
And Kaiser Permanente plans a 48,000-square-foot medical office building and clinic on Alton Parkway and Sand Canyon Avenue in Irvine.
The projects are designed to add space to what brokers and developers say is a tight market for medical office space.
“We felt there was a need for medical office space in the Lake Forest area,” said Jeff Phelan, a Panattoni senior partner who works out of the company’s Irvine office.
Population growth and “no medical support for the residents” are behind Panattoni’s project, Phelan said.
Panattoni is serving as developer and contractor on the Foothill Ranch Medical Building. Irvine-based Carlile Coatsworth Architects Inc. is designing the building.
Jim Landis, a senior vice president with NAI Capital Commercial Real Estate in Newport Beach, is handling the building’s leasing. The building should draw general practice doctors, family practitioners, pediatricians and dentists, according to Landis.
“I’m not sure if there will be a surgery center,” he said. The tenants “should mainly be independent, small primary care physicians.”
Panattoni plans a second phase of medical development in the Foothill Business Park, Phelan said. There could be more buildings, “depending on the success” of earlier phases, he said.
