Symantec Markets 239,000 SF on Westside

CULVER CITY, CA-The second building of Symantec Corp.’s new office campus is under way here in the form of a 239,274-sf office project that will be one of two four-story buildings at the Symantec Southern California Regional Campus. The developer is seeking LEED certification for the building, which will be one of the largest blocks of office space on the market on the Westside of Los Angeles in 2007.

Symantec has named Carl Muhlstein and Andrew McDonald from Cushman & Wakefield as leasing agents for the property, which is taking shape at 800 Corporate Pointe and is scheduled to be ready for occupancy in the fourth quarter of next year. The LEED designation stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, a certification granted by the US Green Building Council.

Located atop Fox Hills in Culver City, the Symantec campus is adjacent to the 90 Freeway and the Fox Hills Transit Center. It is being designed by HOK architects.

The new Symantec building will open in a West Los Angeles office market that has improved steadily in recent years, with recent market reports pegging the vacancy at 7.4%, down from about 8% in the second quarter this year and down from 10.2% in the third quarter of last year.

At the same time, rents have been rising in the market, where relatively little new space has been built in recent years and entitlements to build are difficult to secure, although some large projects are in the works. One tally lists about 800,000 sf of new space that will come onto the market in late 2006 or early 2007, but most of that space has been pre-leased.

According to Culver City Redevelopment Agency documents, the Symantec site is approximately nine acres on the south side of Slauson Avenue, bounded by Bristol Parkway, State Route 90 and Hannum Avenue. The redevelopment agency says that the Symantec project will fulfill the agency’s goal of completing one of the last two remaining portions of the Corporate Pointe development “with a use and building that are compatible with the existing Corporate Pointe office buildings.”