DeVry to Sell 20-Acre Campus

Seeking to profit from the region’s hot real estate market, educator DeVry Inc. plans to sell its 20-acre DeVry University campus in West Hills to the highest bidder.

DeVry University may stay as a tenant in the 106,000-square-foot building it built six years ago at 22801 Roscoe Blvd. or move to another location in the San Fernando Valley.

Improvements in technology and regional growth are changing the way DeVry operates, Vice President Rose Marie Dishman said. More students are taking at least part of their courses online, and those who do attend classes are finding it harder to get to school on increasingly congested freeways.

“We think we can serve our students better with more sites in different locations,” Dishman said. “We’re looking at multiple sites in Southern California with smaller footprints.”

Publicly traded DeVry declined to say how many pupils attend the West Hills school, but Dishman said DeVry had about 4,000 college and graduate students at its campuses in West Hills, Long Beach and Pomona. Another campus is slated to open this summer, in Colton.

The planned sale was also propelled by unsolicited inquiries from developers and investors looking for property. Office vacancy in the San Fernando Valley is at 10%, a multiyear low, and home prices have rocketed upward in the last few years.

“It was dawning on us that our campus was too large, but the outside interest is what motivated us to take bids right now,” said Dishman, who would not disclose her target price.

A San Fernando Valley developer who asked not to be identified because he may bid on the property estimated that the building alone was worth about $20 million but that the entire site could be worth $70 million or more to a condominium developer if it could be rezoned for residential use.

The West Hills campus could be developed as a commercial or residential project, taken over by another corporate user or purchased as an investment by a large institution, said real estate broker Matt Hargrove of Cushman & Wakefield, who represents the seller.

DeVry built its campus on a portion of an 80-acre site that was once home to the missile systems operations of defense contractor Hughes Aircraft. Hughes divided the property and sold it in the mid-1990s.

Shares of Oakbrook Terrace, Ill.-based DeVry Inc. closed up 1 cent at $20.45.