Electronics manufacturer Epson America Inc. is moving its headquarters from Long Beach to Orange County, after signing the largest reported office lease by square footage in OC in about five months.
The company last week said it had completed a deal to take all of 3131 Katella Ave., a two-building project in Los Alamitos that recently underwent a multimillion-dollar renovation.
Epson, a manufacturer of printers and scanners that’s a unit of Japan-based Seiko Epson Corp., will move into its new headquarters in summer 2020.
The company is moving about 600 employees into the campus, according to the local office of Dallas-based Lincoln Property Co., which bought the property at the end of 2014 for about $13 million.
That employee figure will place the company No. 2 among top employers in the city, trailing only the Los Alamitos Medical Center, according to city records.
“This is a huge win for us, for Epson and for Los Alamitos,” said Parke Miller, executive vice president at Lincoln Property. “Usually, tenants end up renewing at their existing space, and Epson could have stayed in place but they made the decision to relocate and build out a new facility.”
The Los Alamitos site is about four miles from Espon’s existing Long Beach building.
The move will add another large printer maker with ties to Japan to OC’s base of companies with substantial operations here; others include Ricoh USA and Toshiba.
Epson is working on a design for its build-out of the new site, which will include creative office space, conferences and technology labs, and a new showroom, called the Epson Experience Center.
“This is an exciting time for Epson America, and considerable thought went into making this strategic decision. Ultimately, ensuring that our employees have the world-class facilities necessary to continue to innovate, compete, and build careers was our top priority,” Keith Kratzberg, Epson America president and chief executive, said in a statement.
The company’s office expansion—it currently occupies about 136,000 square feet in Long Beach—is part of its goal to “greatly expand business in the office and industrial domains by 2025,” according to Epson.
The company said the new space could hold an additional 100 employees beyond those 600 that will relocate.
It also has two manufacturing and warehouse locations in Carson totaling approximately 520,000 square feet. It’s keeping those spots.
Retail Nixed
Lincoln Property’s recent work on the Los Alamitos office project is the largest commercial redevelopment in the city in several years. The site is situated at the intersection of Katella Avenue and the (605) Freeway, along the OC and Los Angeles County borders.
Lincoln Property invested about $5 million to update the approximately 40-year-old property, which was previously occupied and constructed by SuperMedia Inc.; at one time it was one of the country’s largest yellow-pages directory publishers.
Changes included upgrades to the exterior and common areas, landscaping and interior renovations.
A larger retail project at the site was once envisioned.
At one point, Lincoln Property was in talks to buy the neighboring Los Alamitos City Hall, knock down the buildings, and build a shopping center at the two sites.
The company had signed preleases with several large retailers, including what would have been one of California’s first 365 Whole Foods stores as an anchor tenant.
The idea was ultimately nixed, partly due to Amazon’s 2017 acquisition of Whole Foods.
So, Lincoln decided to maintain and revamp the offices, soon to be occupied by Epson.
Terms of the lease were undisclosed.
In the Works
It’s already been a busy year for Lincoln Property, which currently has three different developments in OC that are in varying stages of work.
It recently launched the first phase of Flight, Orange County’s first substantial ground-up creative office campus, and upon completion, the largest office park in Tustin. It has two office tenant deals for the first phase of construction there, which consists of an eight-building collection of offices and event space that runs about 470,000 square feet.
Tenants disclosed so far include coworking company Work Well Win and e-commerce marketing firm Branded Online (see March 25 issue, page 1).
Lincoln’s next area development will be a small-scale project in Costa Mesa: a revamp of an existing multitenant complex along Paularino Avenue that is also home to the Dallas-based real estate firm’s local office.
The $12 million renovation will update the façade of the four buildings, renovate a currently unused central courtyard and add an event space and coffee shop.
The complex, next to the Costa Mesa (55) Freeway and slated to wrap up this fall, will be called Culture Yard.
In addition to its development efforts, Lincoln remains an active investor in area office properties, having closed in February on a six-building office portfolio of local buildings previously owned by Santa Ana-based Colton Co.
It paid about $74 million for the 400,000-square-foot collection of offices, which includes two buildings in Orange, two more in Laguna Hills, one in Anaheim and one in Lake Forest.
