A Colorado-based health care company is moving its California headquarters and about 800 workers from Harbor Gateway to a newly renovated, state-of-the-art complex in El Segundo, the latest corporation to move to that city’s booming commercial office market.
DaVita HealthCare Partners will move in December from a 10-story office building it shares with Herbalife in a sliver of Los Angeles at 190th Street and Vermont Avenue. The property has a Torrance mailing address, but is not within the city limits.
Its new site consists of 185,000 square feet of space in two adjacent buildings at a former aerospace complex called the Apollo at Rosecrans. The entire five-building complex has 545,000 square feet.
“This is an upgrade and it’s an investment,” spokesman David Tauche said. “We’re moving to a big open floor plan with modern fixtures and better amenities.’
Its also a “cultural” move; the office will be a short walk from DaVita Kidney Care’s central business office on Hawaii Street in El Segundo, Tauche said. And it’s a five-minute stroll from a light rail station.
The complex was deliberately designed to break with the layout of conventional offices, said David Jordon, president and owner of SSV Properties, which jointly owns the complex with Invesco Real Estate.
“We developed this very intentionally with the goal of creating a very different office experience for tenants who want to change how they operate,” he said. “We have much larger floor plans, which allows for a much more efficient layout, particularly for those tenants that want open space collaborative design verses the more traditional perimeter office.”
For example, it’s pet-friendly, allows work to occur outside and has windows that open for fresh air.
“We are creating a modern, progressive feel in the workplace, which is intended to match the culture of our organization,” said Joe Mello, chief operating officer at HealthCare Partners.
DaVita is the latest company to move to El Segundo.
Sam Lee, the city’s director of planning and building safety, said a marketing campaign armed in part with a $375,000 grant from Chevron is helping lure corporations.
In addition, the city created an Economic Advisory Council and, in the case of Apollo at Rosecrans, changed its zoning codes to accommodate the indoor-outdoor working environment the office complex has created.
Similar office environments are in short supply, Jordon said.
“We are fully leased now,” he said. “There is definitely a strong component of the Westside and Playa Vista reaching full occupancy. We have seen a lot of migration from the south of El Segundo, too.”
