City of Hope Acquires $108M SoCal Development Site

City of Hope at FivePoint Gateway, Irvine, Calif. Image courtesy of City of Hope

City of Hope has paved the way for the creation of a comprehensive cancer campus—part of the planned development of its $1 billion regional cancer care network in Orange County, Calif.—with the acquisition of a site at the FivePoint Gateway office complex in Irvine. The cancer treatment institution acquired the 11-acre property, currently home to a 190,000-square-foot building and additional developable land, from Five Point Office Venture I LLC in a transaction valued at $108 million. 

Carrying the address of 15161 Alton Parkway, City of Hope’s future home delivered in 2017 as part of what was then known as the Broadcom Corporate Campus, a 1 million-square-foot destination. The Gensler-designed building last changed hands that same year, when Five Point Holdings LLC, the majority partner in Venture I, acquired the four-story structure and the remaining three buildings that comprised the Broadcom Corporate Campus for $443 million in a partial sale-leaseback deal. Completion of the transaction with City of Hope comes almost one year after Venture I inked a letter of intent to sell the property to the world-renowned cancer research and treatment institution.

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City of Hope will convert 15161 Alton into a state-of-the-art cancer center, marking its first comprehensive facility outside its Los Angeles-area flagship campus roughly 50 miles away in Duarte. The outpatient center will also house a clinical research center. City of Hope will later develop the remaining acreage into an acute care cancer hospital, which will be the first hospital in Orange County dedicated exclusively to the treatment and curing of the disease. Transformation of 15161 Alton is scheduled to commence immediately.

Specialty Expansion

City of Hope’s FivePoint Gateway campus is just one of a growing number of health-care property expansion projects centering on the treatment of cancer. “Increasing focus on specialty services and cancer care is expected to be the major driver among hospital services providers globally,” according to a 2019-2026 forecast report from Grand View Research Inc. “Rising cost of medical services and increasing incidence of cancer in North America are expected to fuel market growth during the forecast period.”

Among the current list of notable cancer-related development endeavors in the U.S. is RWJBarnabas Health and Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey’s plans for a $750 million, free-standing cancer pavilion in New Brunswick, N.J. And earlier this year, OSF HealthCare secured state approval clearing the way for the eventual development of a $237 million comprehensive cancer center at Saint Francis Medical Center in Peoria, Ill.

The new City of Hope cancer center is on track to open in 2021 and the hospital, which has no construction start date just yet, is scheduled to open in 2025.