Seminis Vegetable Seeds to Get a Bigger Plot at McInnes Ranch
Since the Saticoy-based Seminis Vegetable Seeds operation was established nearly two years ago as a result of a merger of seed companies, officials have recognized the need to move to larger quarters.
Company headquarters, formerly occupied by the Petoseed Co., did not easily accommodate the increased staff, and the site lacked room for expansion.
Seminis recently ended its long search for a new home with the purchase of a 32-acre parcel within Oxnard’s McInnes Ranch business park. The company plans to build a 300,000-square-foot facility on the site to house the operation’s corporate office--currently located in Oxnard--and its Saticoy processing and distribution facility.
The land purchase was part of a flurry of activity at the 10-year-old business park, located at Rice and Sturgis roads, where about half of its 294 acres has been sold over the past several months.
In addition to the Seminis transaction, 66 acres were sold to a Los Angeles land developer, with smaller parcels purchased by a division of the McCormick & Co. spice operation and the locally owned Cosmetic Specialties.
“We’ve now sold most of the unoccupied land,” said Russ Goodman, regional president of the Sares-Regis Group, the Irvine-based developer and property management group overseeing McInnes Ranch. “After five years of no activity, the dam broke and there is a lot of pent-up interest.”
Goodman credited the general economic trend for the shift from little buyer interest in the early 1990s to the more activity recently.
“We went for years where you could buy buildings for below replacement costs, so there was no reason for anybody to build new buildings,” he said. “We reached a peak about a year ago. Developers began building buildings and now some users are willing to take the risk. They’re saying, ‘I’ll save a little money and build the building myself.’ ”
For Seminis officials, the appeal of the McInnes property was its proximity to the company’s current headquarters. Seminis had looked at a number of other properties in Thousand Oaks, Santa Paula as well as Woodland in Northern California.
“We wanted to stay here--this is where all of our experienced people are,” said Larry Flack, vice president of world production operations for Seminis. “This site was more expensive than some of the other areas we looked at, but the benefits outweighed the reduced capital outlay in other areas.”
Jim Meaney, senior associate of the Ventura-based CB Commercial Real Estate Group, which represented Seminis in the transaction, said a price reduction on the McInnes property helped his client make the decision.
“It has always been considered a premier business park in Oxnard, but it’s always been expensive,” Meaney said. “They had a pretty drastic price reduction not long ago that gave Seminis a chance to focus on the park.”
