Los Angeles Market Update: Poised for a Banner Year

As of March, Los Angeles had 8.7 million square feet of office space underway, CommercialEdge data shows. About 43 percent of the pipeline represents buildings expected to come online this year. In March, four properties totaling 329,770 square feet delivered in the Los Angeles market. Just two properties broke ground since January.

Construction delays incurred during the onset of our global health crisis combined with changing needs for the office environment have all contributed to 2021 potentially becoming a banner year for activity. Roughly 4.1 million square feet is expected to come online this year. Over the past 10 years, developers have added an average of 1.8 million square feet of office space each year, peaking in 2017, when 30 properties totaling 3.1 million square feet were completed.

The West Los Angeles and Culver City submarkets are hotspots for new construction with roughly 2.8 million square feet underway. Hudson Pacific Properties is constructing a 684,000-square-foot creative office campus at 10800 Pico Blvd., a mall-to-office full reconversion which will include 45,000 square feet of usable exterior space. In Culver City, a substantial amount of the pipeline consists of Hackman Capital Partners’ 500,000-square-foot, five-building addition to the historic Culver Studios. Upon completion, the modernized studio and creative office space will total 720,850 square feet. Meanwhile, construction activity in L.A.’s CBD consists of an ongoing redevelopment boom, with many large-scale creative office projects underway, such as Waterbridge Capital and Continental Equities’ 1.2 million-square-feet redevelopment of Broadway Trade Center at 801 S. Broadway.

CommercialEdge covers 8M+ property records in the United States. View the latest CommercialEdge national monthly office report here. We included properties of 25,000+ square feet in our research.