At first, the developer of Calabasas Park Centre envisioned an office complex that would mirror Warner Center in Woodland Hills a sprawling commercial hub with tall skyscrapers rising into the clouds. Lucky for the developer, the community launched a vehement and protracted protest, ultimately succeeding in getting Calabasas Park Centre scaled back dramatically. Thanks in part to its smaller size, it has taken developer Kilroy Realty Corp. less than 10 months to lease about 80 percent of the first phase of its project, a 200,000-square-foot campus-style office complex. And six more tenants are close to signing deals that will fill the balance of the first building well before its scheduled completion in June. “If the developers had gotten what they wanted, their project would be nowhere near as successful as it is to date,” said Mark Persico, director of planning and building services for the city of Calabasas. Calabasas Park Centre sits on an eight-acre parcel adjacent to the Commons at Calabasas, a 200,000-square-foot shopping plaza with restaurants and retail stores, walkways and a manmade lake. When it is completed, the project will include two four-story buildings with outdoor parking. A hotel is also planned for a five-acre parcel behind the complex. So far, VPA Inc., a company that manages self-funded disability programs for large companies, along with homebuilder The Ryland Group and insurance company Poms & Associates have leased space in the first phase of the project. And Kilroy Realty says it has a backlog of tenants interested in space for the second phase of the project, which is set to begin construction in the next few months. “I didn’t even have the kind of activity we have on this building in the mid-’80s,” said Bill Inglis, the broker at CB Richard Ellis Inc. who is handling leasing for the project. While leasing activity has been brisk throughout Los Angeles, brokers and others say what makes Calabasas Park Centre so unusual is that companies don’t typically want to commit to space in new buildings until construction is complete. But tenants opting for Calabasas Park Centre have not only been quick to sign on for the project, they have been willing to pay a freight that’s higher than any other office space in the Valley $2.50 per square foot. One reason is that the city of Calabasas does not charge business taxes, a savings that tenants say makes up for the rent differential. “We get the benefit of the employment pool out here, yet we’re saving some money from the business license and we’re in Calabasas, which is a much better community to work and live in,” said John Gernert, senior vice president and chief financial officer at VPA. Gernert is one of four VPA officials who also live in Calabasas, but he and others point out that the commute to Warner Center is only a few minutes longer, and the real benefit has more to do with the type of community Calabasas offers. The Commons provides restaurants within walking distance of the office complex and, unlike Warner Center, the controlled growth in Calabasas makes the community far more accessible, tenants say. “The Calabasas area is definitely more attractive from an aesthetic standpoint,” said David Poms, president of Poms & Associates, which is moving to Calabasas Park Centre from Warner Center. “If you leave (Warner Center) at 4:30 or 5 o’clock, trying to get onto the freeway is a problem. It’s getting more congested and it wasn’t that way five or 10 years ago.” Yet Warner Center was precisely the model the former developers wanted to emulate in building Calabasas Park Centre. In the mid-1980s, when Ahmanson Commercial Development Co. first applied for entitlements for the project, it was to be a 1.5 million-square-foot complex of offices, retail and hotel facilities, much like Warner Center, which had become a premier office address. By the early 1990s, when Kilroy partnered with Ahmanson (the latter ultimately sold its interest to Kilroy), the Southern California economy had begun to falter, and the developers scaled back the project to 1 million square feet of primarily retail space. But the reduction wasn’t enough for the community, which ultimately filed for and won its own city charter, in a power grab designed in part to squelch the project. When an agreement was finally reached, half the original 45-acre site was sold to Caruso Affiliated Holdings for a shopping center, a five-acre parcel was sold to a hotel developer and another seven acres went to the city of Calabasas for a civic center complex, leaving an eight-acre parcel for Kilroy’s office development. The new size of the project turned out not only to be more acceptable to the community, it was more attractive to potential tenants. By the time Kilroy began building, the trend had turned from luxury, high-rise structures to more casual, campus-style developments, which, because of their lower density, create less traffic and congestion. “Any successful project like this represents a balance between a lot of competing interests,” said Hugh Greenup, executive vice president of Kilroy Realty. “I think we’ve got a great balance here now. I wouldn’t change anything.”
