Urovant Sciences Ltd., an Irvine-based clinical-stage biopharma company that started operations in 2016 and went public last September, is about to get a much larger home near the University of California-Irvine.
The $275 million-valued company (Nasdaq: UROV) recently completed a nearly 22,000-square-foot lease for 5281 California Ave., one of the buildings at the 185-acre UCI Research Park office campus, according to the property’s owner, Newport Beach-based Irvine Co.
The three-story, nearly 70,000-square-foot office where Urovant plans to move later this year is one of several buildings at UCI Research Park—totaling close to 800,000 square feet—vacated about a year ago by Broadcom when it moved its local operations to the Five Point Gateway office campus on the other side of the city.
Those buildings are quickly filling up. Last week, the Business Journal was first to report on computer chipmaker Skyworks Solutions Inc.—a competitor of Broadcom—inking a deal to expand its Irvine operations by about 91,000 square feet at the office park, where it already occupied 127,000 square feet.
The deal for Skyworks—which has its headquarters registered in Massachusetts but its executive offices in Irvine—is one of the largest office leases in Orange County over the past quarter (see our Commercial Real Estate Special Report, starting on page 19).
The leasing activity at UCI Research Park is having an impact on Orange County’s office market, which ended 2018 with a total vacancy rate of 13.9%, up slightly from 12.9% a year ago, according to data from the Irvine office of brokerage JLL.
There were 83 blocks of available space 50,000 square feet or larger, in the market a quarter ago.
That number dropped to 74 at the end of last year—led by the airport area’s drop from 28 to 20 spaces—according to JLL’s latest data.
“Half of the decrease in the airport area occurred in UCI Research Park where leasing activity has been strong since Broadcom vacated its space,” a recently-issued JLL report noted.
Urovant, like Skyworks, already had offices at UCI Research Park. It’s been operating out of the Vine building at the campus. The startup friendly office at 5151 California Ave. is home to the EvoNexus incubator, as well as the Next7 coworking office.
Regulatory filings from mid-2018 show Urovant leasing about 8,000 square feet there, in a lease that was scheduled to run through 2020. The company has yet to disclose terms of the lease for the larger office.
UCI Research Park is being marketed for lease at monthly rents around $2.85 per square foot, according to brokerage data.
Urovant, which is developing therapies for urologic conditions including overactive bladders, reported employing 26 people as of mid-2018, at the time it filed to go public.
The new space should comfortably hold 100 or so employees for the drugmaker, which raised about $140 million in its IPO, one of the two largest in Orange County last year.
Shares were priced at $10 for the IPO and topped $14 for a short period, prior to the overall market’s downturn at the end of last year.
Urovant’s shares now trade just under $10.
ARES Update
In the column for the Jan. 7 edition of the Business Journal, I noted that Irvine-based apartment investor Advanced Real Estate Services Inc. bought a 194-unit complex in Ontario called Mountain Summit from Los Angeles-based TruAmerica Multifamily.
Financial terms of the deal were not immediately disclosed, but are now being reported.
The garden-style multifamily property traded hands for nearly $42.3 million, or $218,000 per square foot, according to brokerage Berkadia, whose Jim Fisher, Jeff Rowerdink and Mike Smith represented the sellers in the deal, which closed on Dec. 19.
ARES said it plans to rename the complex “West Fifth Apartments” and will spend about $5.5 million in upgrades for the property, which previously was a condo development. The complex sits just south of the 10 Freeway on the western edge of the city.
