A Santa Ana building that’s been home to Westcliff Medical Laboratories Inc. is up for sale.
Irvine Corporate Center, at 1821 E. Dyer Road near the Costa Mesa (55) Freeway, is being offered for $11 million, or about $87 a square foot, according to marketing materials. The building has 126,633 square feet of space and will be about 25% full after Westcliff officially vacates 66,000 square feet in May.
A former owner gave Irvine Corporate Center back to lenders in 2010 amid falling vacancy rates, and the building now is owned by SunAmerica Life Insurance Co., according to Washington, D.C.-based market tracker CoStar Group Inc.
Westcliff is owned by Laboratory Corporation of America Holdings in Burlington, N.C.
LabCorp spokespeople didn’t return calls.
The company said in a state filing in 2011 it would move or cut more than 300 jobs in Santa Ana over several months. Speculation on industry message boards at the time indicated LabCorp was planning to move to San Diego most of the testing accounts it got in its 2010 acquisition of Westcliff.
Irvine Corporate Center was constructed in 1976 and renovated 10 years later. The two-story building had an assessed value of almost $19 million a few years ago.
Cushman & Wakefield Inc.’s Irvine office has the listing for Irvine Corporate Center. Brokers Jeffrey Cole and Ed Hernandez are handling the property’s marketing.
Cole said the building is being marketed to several types of potential clients, including medical and biomedical users, traditional corporate office users, high-tech companies and also to real estate investors.
Westcliff’s space in the building has “a significant amount of refrigeration units, testing labs that have equipment and over-standard HVAC equipment,” Cole said.
Cushman & Wakefield has received about 100 confidentiality agreements requesting information, he said.
Irvine Corporate Center’s marketing brochure notes that it is near a “high tech corridor” on Red Hill Avenue. Several medical device companies have operations in the area, including heart valve maker Edwards Life-sciences Corp., Abbott Laboratories, Bax-ter International Inc. and Medtronic Inc.
LabCorp—which has annual revenue of $5.5 billion and a recent market value of $8.9 billion—administers medical tests and processes samples. It bought Westcliff in 2010 for $57.5 million after the latter filed for bankruptcy protection.
LabCorp had to beat back a challenge to the deal from the Federal Trade Commission, which contended the buy would harm medical laboratory competition.
The FTC argued the acquisition would leave New Jersey-based Quest Diagnostics Inc., owner of Quest Diagnostics Nichols Institute in San Juan Capistrano and Focus Diagnostics Inc. in Cypress, as the only other large laboratory serving Southern California. U.S. District Judge Andrew Guilford in Santa Ana eventually denied the challenge.
Irvine Corporate Center has two smaller tenants besides Westcliff: nonprofit at-risk youth services agency Community Services Programs, which has 15,885 square feet, and financial advisory firm Xroads Solutions Group LLC, which occupies 14,372 square feet.
