Alexandria Moves Forward With Plan To Redevelop Thousand Oaks Life Sciences Campus
Alexandria Real Estate Equities is moving forward with its plan to turn a vacant Thousand Oaks, California, life sciences property — the former home of Amgen — into a 350K SF campus.
The company would raze the existing buildings, about 170K SF in total, and replace them with four new buildings totaling 351K SF, CoStar reported.
Three of the new buildings would be combination lab and office, with about 60% of the space devoted to lab uses, according to documents filed with the city of Thousand Oaks. About 2,200 lab and office employees are expected to work at the site once complete.
Thousand Oaks has been a growing life sciences hub since Amgen was founded in the 1980s.
Though a construction start date was not disclosed in the public documents, Alexandria did say it expects construction to take about 36 months once it begins.
The property at 1100 Rancho Conejo Blvd. has been empty since 2017, when Amgen moved out. Alexandria bought it in September 2021 for $28M, according to CoStar. A representative for Alexandria did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
This project is moving ahead but not all of Alexandria’s planned developments have been so lucky. Alexandria said in a regulatory filing in August that it backed out of a plan to develop a new 600K SF project in California, though it did not disclose a location.
“Since the company’s initial investment, the macroeconomic environment has deteriorated and negatively impacted the financial outlook for this project,” the company stated in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Alexandria took a $30M loss when it backed out.
Investments in life sciences development and expansion from venture capital and other sources hit records in 2020 and 2021 but is expected to taper off in 2022 as other economic factors lose steam.
