Medical Offices Set for South OC
By VITA REED
A medical office building planned for Mission Viejo could help ease what some see as a dearth of healthcare facilities in South County.
Mission Hills Medical Center LLC is in escrow to buy 2.5 acres of land in the masterplanned High Park business complex near Alicia Parkway and Jeronimo Road in Mission Viejo.
Plans call for a two-story, 30,000-square-foot medical building on the site.
Mission Hills, which is buying the vacant land from Newport Beach-based CT Realty Corp., is working through the entitlement process and hopes to start construction in February, with doctors moving in by November 2004, according to Michael Todd, Mission Hills’ managing member. Todd also is a principal of CMT Development Inc. in Irvine.
The building would be carved into medical offices for sale, Todd said. Doctors could buy as little as 1,000 square feet of space, or they could buy an entire floor,about 13,000 square feet, he said.
Todd said doctors who don’t need to be based out of a hospital would be good candidates for the center.
Mission Hills Medical Center will be about three miles from Saddleback Memorial Medical Center in Laguna Hills and about six miles from Mission Hospital Regional Medical Center in Mission Viejo.
Brokers and developers say South County has a tight market for medical office space.
“To my knowledge, no one else in South County is doing small medical space under 5,000 or 6,000 square feet,” Todd said.
Lee & Sakahara Architects AIA of Irvine is designing the building. Kaye-T Wing and Kurt Bruggeman, agents with Lee & Associates Commercial Real Estate Services Inc.’s Irvine Spectrum office, are marketing the building.
Mission Hills Medical Center is one of several medical office developments that have been built in Orange County in recent years. Most of them are north of Irvine.
Costa Mesa-based Boureston Development Inc., run by Todd’s former partner, Rich Boureston, is gearing up to build a 30,000-square-foot, two-story medical office building on land that once housed a retail nursery Irvine’s Woodbridge section.
That medical building is similar to Walnut Grove Medical Center, a two-story facility that Boureston built last year on Anaheim Boulevard near Western Medical Center-Anaheim.
Last year, DMK Inc., a Tustin-based contractor, built the $7.3 million Main Street Medical Plaza in Orange. The complex is made up of a pair of two-story, 40,000-square-foot buildings on the old Ford of Orange site on Main Street.
Also last year, investor group Irvine Medical Holdings spent $4.2 million to buy a 3.1-acre parcel at the corner of Waterworks Way and Laguna Canyon Road on the western edge of the Irvine Spectrum for the $11 million, two-story, 43,000-square-foot Irvine Medical Plaza.
And Kaiser Permanente is planning a 48,000-square-foot medical office building and clinic on Alton Parkway and Sand Canyon Avenue in Irvine.
