One of the biggest medical device firms in Orange County plans a major expansion and hiring push after signing a deal to move its local operations from Yorba Linda to an office project being built in the Irvine Spectrum.
Vyaire Medical Inc., a Chicago-based firm whose local operations were previously run under the CareFusion name, recently inked a 185,000-square-foot lease at Irvine Co.’s Quad at Discovery Business Center, a four-building project on Sand Canyon Avenue next to the Santa Ana (5) Freeway.
Construction started on the speculative development, a mix of three- and four-story buildings, about five months ago. Vyaire will move into two of the buildings when the campus opens next summer.
It will lease the 105,600-square-foot office at 520 Technology Drive and the 79,200-square-foot 510 Technology Drive office, according to Irvine Co. officials.
The glass-sheathed offices are being built under Irvine Co.’s NextGen design, which features tenant-friendly amenities, lots of indoor-outdoor work space, and cutting-edge architecture.
By square footage, Vyaire’s deal is the third-largest new office lease in Orange County this year and the largest for Irvine Co., Orange County’s dominant landlord, according to CoStar Group Inc. records.
Doubling in Size
Vyaire has leased about 140,000 square feet of space in Yorba Linda, where it employs an estimated 300 and has long been one of the city’s biggest employers.
The new location will hold about double that, and the new lease gives the company the option to expand at other nearby Irvine Co. buildings, according to Dave Marino, executive vice president for tenant brokerage Hughes Marino, whose Irvine office represented Vyaire in the lease.
Vyaire will bring in some employees from other locations and is setting up a temporary, 30,000-square-foot office in the Spectrum area in the near-term to help with hiring for the new location, according to Marino.
“They’re looking to make (the Spectrum location) an innovation and R&D center,” he said.
Vyaire, formed about a year ago, makes devices for respiratory diagnostics, ventilation, anesthesia delivery and patient monitoring.
Its Yorba Linda operations had been wholly owned by medical technology company Becton, Dickinson and Co. in Franklin Lakes, N.J., which also goes by BD.
In October 2016, BD spun off a respiratory products division that included CareFusion’s operations into the new Vyaire business, which is also backed by London-based private-equity firm Apax Partners.
At the time, Vyaire’s said its annual sales were about $800 million, with 5,000 workers.
In the past year, the newly formed company has realigned “every aspect of our business,” said President and Chief Executive Dave Mowry in a statement this month.
“We’ve spent a lot of time in this first year re-engineering our organization, operations and culture to keep the customer at the center of everything we do,” he said.
The move to Irvine is part of that.
“This location aligns with Vyaire’s future growth plans by being able to better access top external talent markets in and around Irvine,” said Chief Financial Officer David Stafford.
Being in the Irvine Spectrum “will help us with recruitment.”
The company’s CareFusion operations ranked as Orange County’s 19th-largest medical device maker last year by employee count, based on Business Journal data. Boosting its OC employee base to nearly 600 would put it closer to the No. 10 spot.
The deal “is all about their employee base, and helping them to retain and attract those employees,” said Tom Greubel, vice president of leasing for Irvine Co.’s office division.
Spec Success
Vyaire’s deal is the latest leasing coup for Irvine Co., validating its push into speculative office development in the Spectrum area over the past few years.
The Quad is now 50% preleased, and two similarly designed offices recently built down the street at its Sand Canyon Business Center are 70% leased, major tenants including AutoGravity and Cavium.
Irvine Co.’s new 21-story 400 Spectrum Center, which opened last month, is 41% preleased, and its sister building, 200 Spectrum Center, opened last year and is 99% full (see real estate column, page 18).
The remaining 7 million square feet worth of Irvine Co. offices in the Irvine Spectrum are 98% percent leased, according to the Newport Beach-based landlord, the largest office owner in the state.
