Large Medical, R & D; Complex Planned for San Juan Capistrano
By VITA REED
Irvine’s Centra Realty Corp. is developing a 12-building, 150,000-square-foot office complex on 12 acres at Rancho Viejo Road near the Santa Ana (I-5) Freeway in San Juan Capistrano.
Centra hopes to start construction in June, with doctors and other tenants moving in at the end of 2004 or in early 2005, said Keith Ross, Centra Realty’s managing partner.
About a third of the space, or 50,000 square feet, is set to be medical office and surgery center space, Ross said.
“There’s a significant need in South County for medical office and ancillary facilities,” Ross said
Besides a surgery center, potential tenants could include podiatrists, orthopedists, dentist, pharmacists and physical therapists, Ross said.
Centra’s talking with two surgery center groups and already has signed tenants, said Ross, who declined to offer names.
The project, dubbed Ortega Ranch, is designed as class A office space, Ross said. He said he wouldn’t release lease rates.
“This is all for lease. The building is not for sale,” Ross said.
Irvine-based Ware Malcomb is Ortega Ranch’s architect. A general contractor and marketing agents for the project haven’t been picked yet.
Ortega Ranch also is set to have some research and development space for a small medical device maker, according to Ross.
“It’s really a combination of office, manufacturing assembly and warehouse space,” he said.
Ortega Ranch is the latest of several medical office projects in Orange County in recent months.
The Irvine office of Panattoni Development Co., a Sacramento-based developer, plans to put up a medical office building on Rancho Parkway South near the Foothill (241) Toll Road in Lake Forest, within the Foothill Business Park.
Panattoni’s plans call for around 18,000 square feet of space in two stories. The building is expected to draw general practice doctors, pediatricians and dentists.
Down in Mission Viejo, Mission Hills Medical Center LLC is buying 2.5 acres of land in the master planned High Park business complex near Alicia Parkway and Jeronimo Road. Plans call for a two-story, 30,000-square-foot medical building.
Mission Hills Medical Center, which hopes to have doctors move in roughly a year from now, is about three miles from Saddleback Memorial Medical Center in Laguna Hills and six miles from Mission Hospital Regional Medical Center in Mission Viejo.
And Boureston Development Inc. of Costa Mesa, is building a 30,000-square-foot medical office building on land that once housed a retail nursery in Irvine’s Woodbridge section. That building is similar to Walnut Grove Medical Center, a two-story facility that’s next to Western Medical Center-Anaheim.
