Valley Re Column

BOB HOWARD NBC has snagged one of the few available full floors of office space in the Burbank Media District, leasing the 18,000-square-foot top floor of the Central Park at Toluca Lake building on West Olive Avenue. The network plans to move its TV syndication and distribution department there, said Jack O’Neill, vice president of facilities for NBC, so the department can be close to NBC’s TV production facilities. The 5-year, $2.75 million lease will involve the relocation of about 25 people, including senior level executives of the department, O’Neill said. Paul Stockwell of Julien J. Studley Inc., the lead broker representing NBC in the deal, said the space is within walking distance of NBC Studios. The area surrounding NBC Studios “doesn’t have much off-lot office space like the area near Disney and Warner and some of the other studios,” Stockwell said. He said NBC was fortunate to find the 18,000 square feet because the space until recently had been occupied by two other tenants. But one of those tenants relocated to another floor in the building and the other chose not to renew when its lease expired, Stockwell said. Finding one contiguous block of 18,000 square feet was tough, Stockwell said, because the office vacancy rate is only about 2 percent in the neighborhood where NBC needed space and about 4 percent for the Media District as a whole. That low vacancy rate is one of the factors prompting L.A.-based developer J.H. Snyder Co. to schedule a November groundbreaking for a 585,000-square-foot office project adjacent to the NBC Studios lot. The six-story building, which will cost an estimated $140 million, is slated to be completed in the summer of 1999. Sherman Oaks buy Los Angeles-based investment partnership Mani Brothers LLC has bought the Sanwa Bank building on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks for $9 million, according to Bob Safai of Santa Monica-based brokerage Madison Partners, which represented Mani Brothers in the deal. The price paid for the four-story, 61,435-square-foot building works out to $146 per square foot and illustrates that prices paid for Class A office buildings in the San Fernando Valley are rising steadily, said Safai, who added that the building was renovated in 1994 and is 86 percent leased. Joseph Mani of Mani Brothers said the price is “near the top of the market” for comparable buildings in the San Fernando Valley, but that it still represents a good deal. “It’s close to top at the moment, but the market is growing and I think you’ll see the prices going higher,” he said. Mani said the sale was an “off-market” deal, meaning his company was able to buy it through private negotiations without having to compete in an open-bidding process. “Most of the deals like this today are going through a bidding process, but we arranged to buy it without having to compete with the REITs,” Mani said. Mani Brothers is a family-owned investment partnership that tends to buy properties to hold for the long-term and is expanding its L.A.-area portfolio. The company’s holdings include industrial properties in downtown Los Angeles as well as office and retail properties in Hermosa Beach and Santa Monica, including Portofino Plaza at Ocean Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard in Santa Monica. Manufacturer’s move E-M Corp. is relocating its Sepulveda-based Kal-Guard Coatings aerospace manufacturing operations to a 26,700-square-foot plant in Chatsworth, where it has signed a 10-year, $1.6 million lease, according to Scott Caswell of Delphi Business Properties, who represented the company in the deal. The property is on Superior Street near DeSoto Avenue. Kal-Guard produces specialty coatings and lubricants used by the aerospace industry for a variety of purposes, according to Bob Weible, vice president at E-M. Weible said Kal-Guard will more than double the size of its operations with the move to Chatsworth. The company will move 100 workers over from its Sepulveda location, he said, and expects to hire between 20 and 30 additional workers once the division gets settled into the new building. Weible said Kal-Guard also plans to build an additional 5,500 square feet of office space at the new site, which he said will be a more efficient operation because it has more electrical power as well as higher ceilings that permit more warehouse storage. According to Caswell, the Kal-Guard expansion is one of a number of recent deals that suggest manufacturing is making a comeback in the Valley. He said Chatsworth-based Aware Products Inc., a manufacturer of hair and skin care products, recently leased more than 26,000 square feet on Deering Avenue near Canoga Avenue in Chatworth, an expansion to the 53,000 square feet the company already occupies in a nearby building. Caswell said Sylmar-based BEI Sensors and Systems Co., which makes motion sensors installed in Cadillacs as well as sensors for other commercial and government uses, recently hired him to seek expansion space of up to 100,000 square feet for the company’s growing operations, now housed in a 65,000-square-foot facility. Van Nuys acquisition Sherman Oaks-based DMP Properties, an investment group, has purchased the 50,000-square-foot Hayvenhurst Business Park in Van Nuys for $2.45 million, according to Gary DiMartino of Grubb & Ellis Co., who represented both the buyer and the seller, New York-based Brookhill Group.