Glendale

0

By JOYZELLE DAVIS

Staff Reporter

Another skyscraper is on the drawing boards for Glendale, one of the busiest office development submarkets in the Los Angeles area.

The Glendale City Council has selected Reliance Development Group’s 23-story, 475,000-square-foot tower for the city’s redevelopment site at 800 N. Central Ave.

New York-based Reliance Development, a subsidiary of publicly traded Reliance Group Holdings, has already developed two buildings in Glendale, IHOP Corp.’s headquarters at 525 Brand Blvd. and the 18-story Cigna HealthCare of California headquarters at 505 Brand Blvd. Both were built in the late ’80s.

Reliance’s proposed $104 million project will be “unlike anything in L.A.,” said Victor Feathers, vice president. To design the tower, Reliance has hired the New York-based architectural firm of Kohn Pedersen Fox, which also designed the 1000 Wilshire building and 550 S. Hope building in downtown.

Henry Lambert, president of Reliance Development, declined to project a completion date, saying that the company has not decided whether to build the project on a “speculative” basis (without a prior tenant commitment).

“It all depends on if people are screaming for space or if the whole market collapses,” he said. “You don’t want to roll up your pants until you get to the stream.”

Reliance still has to assemble the entire property, which currently is split between the city’s land and a privately owned parcel where a restaurant operates. Then the developer must receive entitlements before the project can break ground.

The city selected Reliance in part because of its track record of attracting corporate headquarters to Glendale, said Jeanne Armstrong, the city’s director of development services. Six other criteria, such as design and site assemblage proposals, were also considered, she said.

The selection of Reliance by the City Council, which acts as Glendale’s redevelopment agency, surprised some observers. Opus West, one of the bidders, seemed to be in a strong position because it had already worked out an arrangement with the restaurant’s owner to purchase his property.

“We’re disappointed of course, but we plan to lick our wounds and look for another deal in Glendale,” said Paul Marshall, vice president of development for Opus West. The Minneapolis-based company, one of the nation’s largest developers, has yet to break into the Los Angeles market.

Other developers also have designs on Glendale, which had a 10 percent office vacancy rate as of year end, according to Cushman & Wakefeld Inc. Los Angeles-based PacTen Partners is building a 500,000-square-foot office building at 655 N. Central Ave. without any tenant commitments. The Glendale-based Howard Platz Group is currently building a 160,000-square-foot office tower at 400 N. Brand Blvd. and recently secured a 120,000-square-foot lease to relocate Cigna from 505 Brand Blvd.

Another project that could potentially break ground before Reliance is the second phase of Glendale City Centre.

The current owner, a pension fund advised by Westmark Realty Advisors, is in the process of selling the entire Glendale City Centre both the existing 18-story first-phase tower and the second-phase development site. Westmark is evaluating final bids for the project.

The second-phase site, located at Brand and Wilson Avenue, is already approved for a 22-story tower with 385,000 square feet of space.

The sale is expected to close by March, and the new owner could conceivably complete the new building by early 2000, said Bill Boyd, senior vice president at CB Commercial Real Estate Group Inc., who is representing Westmark in the pending sale.

No posts to display