83.9 F
San Fernando
Friday, Mar 29, 2024

Precision Dynamics Plans Move to Valencia Property

In a bid to consolidate offices after merging with a local competitor, health care label and identification provider Precision Dynamics plans to move its headquarters this summer from San Fernando to Valencia. The relocation, which involves about 250 employees, will inject life into a troubled real estate development along the Golden State Freeway. Precision Dynamics Corp.-St. John recently signed a seven-year lease for about 44,000 square feet at the long vacant LNR Entrada Gateway Center. The center’s 100,000-square-foot building has been without a tenant since construction finished in 2008. In early summer, Precision plans to vacate its San Fernando headquarters on Del Sur Street and its Valencia office that served as the former base of The St. John Companies Inc. The relocation brings 101 employees from the San Fernando location and 147 from Valencia, the company said. “This is very much a part of creating truly one company,” CEO Cecil Kost said. The new corporate headquarters along the 5 freeway in the Santa Clarita Valley will boost efficiency and help create a distinct, combined company culture, Kost said. “Having the two operations 18 miles apart certainly creates its fair share of challenges,” he said. Since the Precision-St. John merger was announced in January 2011, the private company has gone through several changes. Precision-St. John laid off employees to eliminate redundancies, Kost said, declining to say how many workers were affected. Precision also moved manufacturing out of its 74,000-square-foot San Fernando building at 13880 Del Sur Street in order to increase quality and lower costs. Most manufacturing now takes place in Mexico, as well as Florida and Brussels, Belgium, he said. The merger has strengthened Precision and improved its “position as a global leader of identification solutions,” Kost said. The company’s move to Valencia will not result in any job cuts, he said. The lease deal, which Kost said was valued at about $10 million, is a significant coup for LNR Property LLC’s commercial property group — the developer of the Entrada project. When LNR announced it broke ground on the project more than four years ago, plans called for two, four-story buildings totaling 200,000 square feet. But when the economy soured, planned leases fell through and the second building was put on hold. What was billed as the “premier office campus in the Santa Clarita Valley” remained unfinished and for years the first building’s shell was visible to hundreds of thousands of daily commuters on the Golden State Freeway. Plans for Entrada Now, a build-out is underway. Like many other companies, Precision is morphing its new offices into a more open-planned environment designed to foster collaboration and creativity. That means fewer formal offices and about 15 meeting places where employees can collaborate on projects and ideas, Kost said. Executive Vice President Doug Marlow and Senior Vice President David Solomon of CBRE Group Inc. represented LNR Property in the deal. Executive Vice Presidents Craig Peters, Doug Sonderegger and Bennett Robinson of CBRE represented Precision. Marlow said the Precision lease allowed LNR to bring “permanent power to the building and get the offsite improvements … to effectively compete for Class A tenants.” When Precision moves in this summer, the building at 27770 North Entertainment Drive will be nearly 50 percent leased, Vice President Tim Regan of LNR Property said. That brightens the prospect of breaking ground on the second building and finishing the nine-acre project, he said. LNR is in conversations with three other prospective tenants — including legal and insurance companies — for the first building, Regan said. The firm plans to break ground on the second building once occupancy reaches about 80 percent at 27770 North Entertainment Drive. The Precision lease will help LNR get to that 80 percent figure, Regan said. “It brings life to the building,” he said. “The building is visible from the freeway and it will now be illuminated.” Vice President Ryan House of Jones Lang LaSalle, who was not involved in the deal, said the lease was “fantastic” for a Santa Clarita Valley office market, which has seen increased activity lately. Still, Princess Cruises’s decision to vacate roughly 50,000 square feet this year somewhat mutes the deal’s positive effects, he said. Once Precision moves, it will vacate about 115,000 square feet between its two industrial properties in San Fernando and Valencia. Peters, who along with his team is now charged with leasing those buildings, said he expects the properties to get leased quickly. The hot industrial market and the lack of available industrial space in the San Fernando Valley and Valencia will help to drive interest, he said. Peters said he already conducted several building tours for companies, including bio-medical and aerospace firms.

Featured Articles

Related Articles