New Industrial Life for Former B-2 Site
The Irvine office of Sares-Regis Group will break ground this month on a 1.9-million-square-foot manufacturing and distribution center at a former Northrop Grumman facility in Pico Rivera that was used for the design and manufacture of the B-2 Stealth Bomber.
The 100-acre project, to include 10 buildings, will be called Pico Rivera Commerce Center. The first phase of construction will consist of two buildings totaling 415,151 square feet, slated for completion next year.
Sares-Regis Group acquired the 155-acre former aerospace facility in April and sold 55 acres to Phoenix-based retail developer Vestar, which is building a 630,000-square-foot retail center that will be anchored by a Wal-Mart store and Lowe’s Home Center.
The development site is on the northern edge of what real estate brokerages define as the --mid-cities industrial market, where brokers say industrial space is in demand because of its proximity to both Los Angeles and Orange County.
“There are very few pieces of land of this size for a master-planned business park in the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area,” said Bruce Bearer, a senior vice president at Sares-Regis. Of the 96 million square feet of industrial space in the mid-cities market, about 5.6% was empty at the end of the third quarter, up from 3.4% at the beginning of the year but still a tight market.
The property served as an aerospace facility beginning in 1982, when Northrop Grumman acquired the property from Ford Motor Co., which had used it from the 1950s to the late 1970s as an auto assembly plant.
