LPC West Buys Pasadena Office, Secures Life Sciences Tenant Ahead Of Renovation
A Pasadena office complex has changed hands and is slated for a life sciences makeover, with one tenant already secured.
LPC West announced Wednesday that it partnered with investment firm Angelo Gordon to acquire 465 North Halstead, an office property on 9.6 acres in eastern Pasadena near the Sierra Madre Villa L Line (formerly Gold Line) station.
The property’s anchor tenant will be biopharmaceutical company Xencor, which develops treatments for cancer and autoimmune diseases. Xencor will move its headquarters from Monrovia to 465 North Halstead, leasing about 148K SF in the roughly 241K SF, two-story building.
LPC West declined to disclose financial details of the sale but said it has closed. Kevin Shannon of Newmark and his team represented the seller of 465 North Halstead, EverWest Real Estate Investors. EverWest purchased the Halstead property in 2016, paying $66.5M, according to commercial real estate data site Reonomy. Chad Urie, Patrick Church and Josh Wrobel of JLL represented Xencor.
The property, which underwent a $5.7M renovation in 2015, will be renovated to include lab space for Xencor, making it a majority life sciences facility, LPC West said in a statement.
“Our new, modern and fully customized workspace will provide our scientists with ample room, as well as future optionality, to advance our innovative protein technologies and to engineer potential new therapies for patients,” Xencor President and CEO Bassil Dahiyat said in a statement.
Xencor is expected to move into the building in two phases starting in the second half of 2022, when it will occupy about 83K SF, according to a company filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Lease terms call for the landlord to provide a tenant improvement allowance of over $17M for build-outs of the first phase of Xencor’s space, which includes the new labs, according to the filing. Xencor’s initial rent will be approximately $386K per month, or $4.65 per SF.
A second phase of the lease term starts no later than the end of September 2026 and will include the remaining approximately 46K SF. The lease term is 13 years from the move-in date of July 1, 2022, the filing states.
Tenants in the greater LA market, which includes Pasadena, are looking for a total of 500K SF of life sciences space from “about a dozen lab and GMP users,” a July CBRE report found. About 229K SF of the sought-after space is under construction now, 66% of which is conversions.
