Glaukos Corp. isn’t done with its expansion plans in Aliso Viejo.
In mid-November, the Business Journal broke news on the medical device maker finalizing a deal to move its headquarters from San Clemente to Aliso Viejo, leasing the 160,000-square-foot Element office campus.
The deal to occupy the three-building former campus of networking products maker QLogic Corp. is the largest office lease reported in Orange County this year.
Glaukos, whose iStent products are used to treat glaucoma, a major cause of blindness, currently leases about 86,000 square feet in San Clemente. Those facilities include manufacturing space.
Despite the plans to move to Aliso Viejo, Glaukos said it intends to maintain the San Clemente facilities “for the foreseeable future,” according to regulatory filings.
In addition to inking a 13-year lease for the Element campus, Glaukos also had an option to buy about 2.8 acres of vacant land next to the Aliso Viejo buildings.
That deal was just completed. Glaukos paid about $7 million for the land, which is entitled for 46,000 square feet of additional office space. The deal works out to a price of about $2.5 million per acre.
A time frame for construction moving ahead at that site hasn’t been disclosed.
Newport Beach-based Stillwater Investment Group, along with the Newport Beach office of financial partner CrossHarbor Capital Partners, bought the Aliso Viejo office campus and the excess land in 2016 for a reported $36 million.
Glaukos (NYSE: GKOS) has a market value of nearly $2.3 billion. Its stock price is up about 140% for the year, one of the largest increases for a local public company this year.
Lone Star Expansion
TRI Pointe Group Inc. (NYSE:TPH) is the second area homebuilder to make a big purchase in Texas this year.
The Irvine-based builder announced this month it was paying $60 million in cash to buy Dallas-based homebuilder Dunhill Homes and its affiliated business Nathan Carlisle Homes, which makes homes for buyers 55 and older.
The deal gives TRI Pointe a larger presence in a key national market. It noted in an announcement disclosing the acquisition that the Dallas-Fort Worth region currently ranks No. 1 among homebuilding markets nationally for entry-level, first move-up and 55-plus communities.
Dunhill Homes should see about 300 homes sales this year, and it has nearly 1,500 lots owned or controlled.
TRI Pointe already has a presence in the area, selling homes through its Trendmaker Homes affiliate; Dunhill’s operations will be folded into the Trendmaker unit.
Trendmaker delivered nearly 1,600 homes for the first nine months of the year, and counted nearly 3,000 lots under its control, according to TRI Pointe’s most recent quarterly report.
The value of TRI Pointe’s stock hasn’t moved much since the Dec. 11 announcement; it has a market value of about $1.6 billion.
This March, another Orange County-based builder, William Lyon Homes (NYSE: WLH), began operations in Texas, after buying fellow Newport Beach-based RSI Communities for $460 million.
RSI, founded by local entrepreneur and philanthropist Ron Simon, had the bulk of its 11,000 lots located in Texas and the Inland Empire at the time of its sale.
Brea Boost
Kansas City-based engineering and architecture firm Burns & McDonnell is boosting the size of its local operations in Brea.
The firm relocated its Orange County office to a 38,277-square-foot location in the Brea Place office complex about 15 months ago; it recently announced it will add another 12,000 square feet there.
The space at the 140 S. State College Blvd. building will hold “the addition of 66 new workstations and three new conference rooms,” the firm said.
The firm has nearly doubled the size of its Orange County-based office since 2017.
Area clients include the Los Angeles World Airports and the Port of Los Angeles.
