Office space a hit to hospital

Alicia Robinson

Medical office space near Hoag Hospital is at a premium, but upcoming

facility surgery is expected to ease the shortage.

One building that won’t be up until early next year is drawing

prospective tenants of all sizes. The Pacific Medical Plaza, a

75,000-square-foot, four-story medical office building, will fill the

space on Newport Boulevard that was once the El Nido and Snug Harbor

mobile home parks in Costa Mesa.

The plaza is a hot prospect because it offers so much space, and

with a vacancy rate of less than 2% in the medical office market

around Hoag Hospital, big spaces are scarce, said John Wadsworth,

vice president of Colliers Seeley, the real estate broker for the

medical plaza.

“We’ve had interest from tenants ... interested in the whole

building,” Wadsworth said. “There’s very little space available right

now. The building was born out of demand for more space down at Hoag

Hospital.”

The plaza may have some competition for tenants requiring less

space. Two smaller medical office projects are in the works on Old

Newport Boulevard in Newport Beach. Medical offices are slated for

the Orange County Board of Realtors building and a building at the

corner of Newport Boulevard and Orange Avenue.

Hoag officials are pleased about the addition of medical office

space because the hospital is expanding, and it just celebrated

adding its 1,000th physician, said hospital marketing vice president

Debra Legan.

“All of them, except for the hospital-based physicians like the

radiologists, have offices outside of the hospital,” she said. “They

primarily see their patients in their own offices.”

Medical offices may be needed, but they aren’t always welcomed.

Costa Mesa planning department staff members recommended that the

Planning Commission reject plans for Pacific Medical Plaza because

they feared the building’s height and size weren’t compatible with

the neighborhood.

Nearby in Newport Beach, some have hoped to convert the largely

vacant Newport Technology Center from tech space to medical offices,

but that has never come to fruition. There’s been some debate over

whether the building’s zoning would allow medical uses, Newport Beach

City Councilman Steve Rosansky said.

Traffic is one of the main drawbacks of medical offices because

they generate more of it than other office uses. The city will likely

have to address traffic problems as more medical offices move in,

Rosansky said.

“Newport Boulevard is already bursting at the seams,” he said.

* ALICIA ROBINSON covers business, politics and the environment.

She may be reached at (714) 966-4626 or by e-mail at

alicia.robinson@latimes.com.