Encore Capital Group is the first tenant to sign a lease at Ampersand, a 340,000-square-foot creative office conversion project in the former San Diego Union-Tribune building. The Casey Brown Co. is repurposing the property into a creative office campus with ample amenities and outdoor space. While the developer wasn't targeting a specific industry for the project, the financial company's interest illustrates the increasing interest for highly amenitized and designed office space across industry types. Encore signed a 95,000-square-foot ground floor lease in the project.
“We all like to be able to put things in a box, but we were really trying to attract tenants that have a focus on productivity and on the health and wellness of their employees,” Casey Brown, principal of The Casey Brown Co, tells GlobeSt.com. “That is the real reason why a tenant would choose Ampersand as their home. They need to be companies that have that focus, and there are economic reasons for that. When you lose an employee, it costs money to replace them. This is a project where employees will be proud of and that guests will be in awe of.”
Encore is the first tenant in the project and will likely be the largest as well. “I'm not surprised that a tenant of 100,000 square feet leased the space,” adds Brown. “Our vision is that there will be 10 to 15 tenants in this project, and those might range from 100,000 square feet to 10,000 square feet.”
With a financial company as a major tenant in the building, “creative” might be an erroneous term to describe the project. Instead, the Casey Brown Co. is a focusing on the employee experience. There is 65,000 square feet of communal outdoor space on the campus and loading docks designed to serve as outdoor meeting space. Many of the office spaces have outdoor patios, and the developer included murals from a local artist. Then, there are the amenities: a 5,000-square fitness studio, an outdoor multifunctional amphitheater, craft coffee, a café, concierge services, valet services and EV parking onsite. These features are all meant to enhance the employee experience, and today, when quality talent is a commodity, is important to every company. “Creative is almost worn out, but if we look at it, it is really about a tailored experience and creating something more than a plywood desk,” says Brown. “This is a well-done project where we really took everything out and started over.”
This is not the only newspaper conversion project. There are several examples in other major California and West Coast markets, and this space was ideal to repurpose as creative office. “This is a well-recognized, iconic building. There is a heck of a story with this project,” adds Brown. “This is a large piece of property, and there are 140,000 square feet of office space in two building. It is extremely well built, and the location is Main-and-Main as it relates to the center of the county.”
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Kelsi Maree Borland
