Culver City to Get Industrial Complex
Landlords who rushed to convert their Culver City industrial buildings to offices during the dot-com boom apparently shrank the industrial market enough to create an opportunity for new construction.
Westway Development expects to break ground this summer on its two-building, 243,000-square-foot project on a 12-acre site near Jefferson Boulevard and Overland Avenue.
The buildings will be what Westway managing member Mark Webber described as “flex” space, which can be used for warehouses, light manufacturing, research and development or other industrial purposes.
Webber’s project will be among the few industrial buildings constructed in recent years in Culver City, which has one of Southern California’s largest concentrations of former industrial properties. Beginning in the mid-1990s, nearly 2.6 million square feet of industrial space in the Marina del Rey-Culver City market was converted to offices, according to a study by Grubb & Ellis.
Owners converted their buildings to accommodate the voracious demand from dot-com companies, entertainment firms, architects, advertising agencies and other tenants who wanted “creative office space” with an industrial look rather than traditional offices, said Grubb & Ellis broker Joseph Gabbaian.
Office space commanded higher rents--up to $2.25 per square foot per month, compared with the 40 to 50 cents per square foot per month the owners were getting for industrial uses. But the widespread conversion left the Westside with a shortage of industrial space, said Gabbaian, who noted that more than 27% of the creative office space in the Marina-Culver City market is now vacant as a result of the dot-com crash and the economic downturn.
Calabasas-based Westway has owned industrial property in Culver City for about 20 years, according to Webber, who expects his project to be completed early next year. He and his attorney, Tony Ciasulli, worked for more than three years to assemble the 12 acres, which Culver City’s community development director, Marsha Rood, described as “one of the few and one of the largest parcels of land available for development in the city.”
Besides settling with nine property owners, Ciasulli said, Westway had to obtain agreements from 10 owners of mineral rights and three operators of oil wells on the land. One working well will remain on the property, but two others were abandoned and capped, a process that requires governmental approval and inspections, which further complicated the deal.
