NBA’s Lakers to Buy 5 Acres for New Training Center at L.A.-Area M-U Campus

By Barbra Murray, Contributing Editor

The Los Angeles Lakers need a place to practice shooting hoops, so the NBA franchise has signed a deal to acquire a five-acre site at the Elevon at Campus El Segundo project in El Segundo, Calif., where it will build its own training center. The seller of the land is CDC Mar Campus L.L.C.., a joint venture consisting of Continental Development Corp, and Mar Ventures Inc., which is developing the 210,000-square-foot Elevon office project, located just outside of Los Angeles.

The new training center will house more than basketball courts; it will also be home to the Lakers’ Development League Team, the Los Angeles D-Fenders, as well as the teams’ business operations offices. Theirs will be a unique environment, as Elevon is not your grandfather’s office campus.

Sited within the nearly 47-acre Campus El Segundo mixed-use property, Elevon will consist of 15 for-sale buildings featuring creative office accommodations and 13,500 square feet of top-notch restaurant and retail space. Dining and shopping options aside, the Lakers may very well find themselves distracted in Elevon’s state-of-the-art indoor/outdoor work environment, which features such amenities as a WiFi Park, a bocce ball court and outdoor kitchen and lounge areas.

The details of the basketball team’s training center, conversely, are being kept under wraps by all involved due to a confidentiality agreement.  However, one very broad indication of the potential size of the facility may be CDC Mar’s offering of development options at Elevon. The developer had been advertising build-to-suit opportunities ranging from 50,000 square feet to 750,000 square feet on two separate fully-entitled parcels encompassing an aggregate 10 acres.

Sources have told Commercial Property Executive that commercial real estate services firms JLL and CBRE Inc.–which oversee build-to-suit opportunities and building sales at Elevon–handled the Lakers transaction, the closing of which is subject to various conditions.