Nearly 50 years ago in 1977, a real estate firm bought up thousands of acres of ranch land in the Conejo Valley.
To put this purchase in perspective, the deal was cemented the same year former President Jimmy Carter had been sworn in, the same year Elvis Presley’s death had devastated the nation, and the year we had just been graced with the first of many “Star Wars” movies.
Disco was exploding, and Shapell Properties grooved to the potential of all that its massive Thousand Oaks acquisition could bring.
Decades later, Shapell has built more than 900 single-family homes in a community that came to be known as Rancho Conejo Village in addition to developing about 350 units in a multifamily property called the Arroyo Villas Apartments and earmarking some pieces of the land as open space.
The company – officially headquartered in Sawtelle – is now ready for the last part of its masterplan in the Valley: Conejo Summit.
Spanning across 50 acres, Conejo Summit will be home to a 750,000-square-foot industrial campus.
“This business park is the final piece,” says John Love, vice president of development and acquisitions at Shapell.
For the last eight years, the Shapell team has been creating a development plan, collaborating with the city on an extensive environmental impact report and going through the approval process. Late last year, the Thousand Oaks City Council gave the green light.
Shapell operates as a long-term holder and as such, Love says they have “a very long-term vision creating these communities and building them out.” However, he does note that this particular phase was “a bit unusually long.”
Emphasizing that fundamentally, the city of Thousand Oaks was “terrific” to work with, there were a few city factors at play that extended the timeline, Love says, including the city undergoing a general plan amendment, some zoning changes and several staff adjustments.
“We’re happy to finally have the ability to finish this off,” Love says.
Project vision
As the plan currently stands, the business park will create 15 separate buildings offering leases ranging from under 10,000 square feet to more than 90,000 square feet. Shapell intends to develop the campus in various phases rather than building out the entirety of the project in parallel.
“If you look at the geographic areas, they’re not all contiguous to one another,” Love says. “And so it can be, and is sort of intended to be, flexible enough to be built in phases and to have each one of those phases either stand alone or be part of a larger phase.”
Shapell also views the buildings themselves as flexible, with Love adding the firm is open to doing build-to-suit projects for worthwhile tenants.
“In a perfect world for us, that first phase could be seeded by a company looking for specific needs,” Love says. “That would give us a little bit more comfort knowing that we have a portion of (the project) spoken for. Then we can add certain buildings on a speculative basis.”
This flexibility on timeline stems from Shapell being the sole owner of the land it’s developing on.
“Because we own the whole thing, without any partners and without any debt, we can be adaptable to how the buildings get built, how they’re used and who those users are,” Love says. “(This allows us) in our minds to really optimize how it gets developed, bringing in the highest quality employers.
“That control to us is critical,” he adds.
Exact costs for the business park will depend on how the buildings end up being built and configured but Love says it’s safe to say the project will exceed $200 million.
Local considerations
Leaders in Newmark’s Calabasas office are assisting with the design and marketing of the project to potential occupants. Patrick DuRoss, vice chairman of that office and a senior member of Newmark’s industrial team in North Los Angeles, says appealing to a range of business sizes is an important part of their strategy.
In addition to creating an ecosystem for the small to mid-sized businesses that illustrate the Conejo Valley, DuRoss wants to attract some larger companies “like the groups that are already here – the Amgens of the world,” he says.
“To do that, we wanted to make sure we had variability in (building) size and divisibility within those to accommodate a large number of groups but also have these modern and really class A features within the industrial business park type framework,” DuRoss says.
Target industries will include life sciences, aerospace and defense, manufacturing and beyond.
DuRoss sees the business park’s location in Thousand Oaks as a differentiator for the development.
“It’s a great place to live, great place to work and it has great schools. In addition to all of that, if you look at the project site, the views and the setting are probably as beautiful as you will find for this type of product,” he said, noting the area’s access to trails, nature and bike riding.
Safety is another factor. A 2024 report from PropertyClub – a real estate technology platform based in New York – deemed Thousand Oaks to be the safest city in California out of cities with populations higher than 125,000.
DuRoss finds safety to be a major concern in industrial business park environments in the city of Los Angeles right now, noting that there’s been a flight to Ventura County as a result. Along with a draw to safer environments, he also points to a flight to quality.
State of the market
To understand the present industrial market, it’s important to consider the sector’s “pandemic boom,” DuRoss says.
“(During the pandemic), industrial buildings were being filled quickly, whereas retail and office saw the inverse impact,” he says. “In 22 years, I’ve never seen anything like it. Vacancy rates were sub 1% pretty much across the board in Southern California.”
This was problematic for businesses who saw their rents doubling as a result of the demand. By mid-2022, things began to slow down, first with occupancy and then with prices accordingly. With that, DuRoss says businesses became a bit more conservative and choosey with the spaces they occupied.
As of the fourth quarter, Colliers reports that the Conejo Valley had a 5.4% industrial vacancy rate compared to 5.7% in Greater Los Angeles. Nationally, the rate stood at 7.3%.
When it comes specifically to class A industrial, DuRoss says availability is slimmer. He pointed to a new class A industrial campus on Conejo Spectrum Street, adjacent to where Shapell’s business park will be. Of the nine buildings spanning 500,000 square feet, 100% of the space leased, DuRoss says.
While there’s some Class A availability for companies looking for a large footprint, he says there’s “zero availability” for more mid-sized firms in the area.
Tariffs have also played a role in shaping the current industrial market.
“When tariffs hit, that really put a lot of companies into pause to see how that was going to impact them,” DuRoss says. “…Then slowly, over the last nine months, there has really been some acceleration as companies have gotten comfortable with what that looks like.”
This has resulted in an increase in leasing velocity while still having a “healthy level of availability,” DuRoss says.
The team looks forward to building out the business park as interest from users develops.
“We want to be thoughtful about how we approach (the project) and open to opportunities that might present themselves,” Love says. “…We are excited about how this project is going to evolve… and we look forward to making it a reality.”
