The Irvine Company has expanded its plans for an office campus that’s been envisioned as a new home for chipmaker Broadcom Corp. near the Irvine Spectrum.
The Newport Beach-based developer has filed plans with the city to build a 10-building office campus near the San Diego (405) Freeway and Laguna Canyon Road.
The midrise campus would total a little more than 1.5 million square feet of office space and include 5,120 parking spaces, according to design plans for the site from architect Pei Cobb Freed and Partners.
If built, it would be the largest office development in Orange County in over a decade.
The site where the project would be is currently unused land that’s between the Quail Hill and Laguna Altura residential communities.
Documents filed with the city show the campus holding one six-story office running 213,000 square feet, with the remainder of the buildings at four stories and about 144,000 square feet each.
A smaller, two-story office totaling 25,000 square feet could also be built on land adjacent to the main campus.
Renderings show a project similar in style to Broadcom’s existing campus at University Research Park, as well as midrise office developments being built by Irvine Co. in Silicon Valley.
The project has the “potential for a large single-user corporate headquarters campus” and is designed to provide conference, and campus support facilities, in addition to core offices, according to city documents.
Tentative plans call for the proposed development to be taken up by the city’s planning department next month, with City Council action expected to follow later in the summer.
Ground Breaking?
There’s been no indication that Irvine Co., Orange County’s dominant landlord, would break ground on the 73-acre project in the immediate future, even if it gets the city’s approvals.
Getting entitlements for the project now doesn’t guarantee that construction is bound to begin any time soon, a source noted last week.
Irvine Co.’s immediate focus for office development in the area around the Spectrum appears to be a 20-story office tower on Irvine Center Drive where work could move ahead later this year.
There’s also been no recent indication that Broadcom is still considering the site—described as “Planning Area 17” in city documents—as a potential location for new headquarters.
Regulatory filings show that the chipmaker—Orange County’s largest office tenant—entered discussions with Irvine Co. last year about a potential build-to-suit office campus at the site. It’s not known how far along those discussions moved.
The project was envisioned for a little more than 1 million square feet of office space at that time.
Irvine Co. has since proposed boosting the maximum office development at the site to 1.8 million square feet by shifting office entitlements from other areas around the Irvine Spectrum to Planning Area 17.
The transfer of entitlements would allow the landlord to be “more responsive to (the) current commercial/office market” and would allow for a campus setting, as opposed to high-rise structures, according to filings with the city.
The proposed 1.5-million-square-foot campus at Planning Area 17 could accommodate one or more large tenants in the event that Broadcom opts to go elsewhere, sources note.
Decision Imminent?
Broadcom has not disclosed its long-term plans for the location of its headquarters, despite comments last year by Irvine Mayor Steven Choi that a deal to relocate the chipmaker to a new development at the former El Toro Marine Corps air station had been struck.
There also still appears to be a chance that Broadcom could opt to renew its lease with Irvine Co. for its existing headquarters.
Broadcom currently leases about 920,000 square feet from Irvine Co. in University Park, a business park next to the University of California-Irvine that runs along the San Joaquin Hills (73) Toll Road.
The chipmaker moved to University Park in 2007 after Irvine Co. built an eight-building campus, inking a 10-year lease initially valued at about $183 million. Broadcom had been based in the Spectrum prior to that move, at buildings that now hold the headquarters of Blizzard Entertainment Inc.
Regulatory filings by Broadcom in January disclosed that the company has the ability to extend its current lease for two one-year periods, the second of which would end in May 2019.
A decision on whether to make an extension beyond mid-2017 must be made by the end of this month according to the Broadcom lease document (see related entries for Irvine Co., Broadcom executives in OC 50 Special Report, starting on page 15).
