Symantec Purchases Fox Hills Campus

Internet security technology provider Symantec Corp. has purchased 9 acres in Fox Hills, where it plans to build a research and development campus with an ocean view.

The new Symantec offices would be about 2 miles from the planned Electronic Arts Inc. production studio in Playa Vista, where the computer game maker would pamper its 300 employees with such perks as beach volleyball, valet parking and jogging trails.

Symantec couldn’t reveal what its campus would look like because plans were being developed, a spokeswoman said. The company’s 500 Los Angeles County employees are in offices at Colorado Center in Santa Monica.

Cupertino, Calif.-based Symantec paid $17 million to Bank of Montreal for the Fox Hills site. The bank had taken the property back from Bramalea California Inc., which had planned to develop the site as part of Corporate Pointe, an office complex at the east end of the Marina Freeway.

As the local economy expanded in the 1980s, Fox Hills office projects such as Corporate Pointe were developed as lower-cost alternatives to prime Westside office space.

During the last half of that decade, Canada-based Bramalea completed office buildings at Corporate Pointe totaling more than 550,000 square feet. New construction was abandoned during the recession of the 1990s, and the existing buildings were purchased by other investors.

The Symantec property is part of a former golf course, said real estate broker Jerry Porter of Cresa Partners, who represented the buyer.

“This pad is sitting right above the Marina Freeway and has a panoramic ocean view,” Porter said. “It will be a phenomenal site” for an office campus.

Symantec plans to build about 200,000 square feet of office space in the first phase of the development, Porter said. The company occupies about 140,000 square feet in Colorado Center, where its lease expires in 2007.

Irvine developer Sares-Regis Group would build the new Symantec facility, Porter said.

Symantec owns the Norton brand of consumer security products and provides such services as computer virus protection, intrusion detection and e-mail filtering.