Prime Warner Center Site Scrutinized for Development

The owners of a decades-old property in the heart of Warner Center are preparing to redevelop the site.

Cornerstone Real Estate Advisors is said to be investigating the redevelopment of 6464 Canoga Ave. at the corner of Victory Boulevard.

The redevelopment is still many months, if not years, away, but it is also probably long overdue.

Since the 1960s, the site has housed a 60,000-square-foot low-rise office building that now appears almost shabby in comparison to the buildings that have grown up in the surrounding area.

Cornerstone, which has owned the property for about seven or eight years, first leased the building to Syncor International Inc., a medical imaging company that was acquired by Cardinal Health Inc. in 2003.

Since the acquisition, Cardinal has either laid off or relocated most of the employees that were once employed in the building. But attempts to sublease the property were only somewhat successful, in all likelihood because of the age of the property, which was rehabbed following the Northridge Earthquake.

But the Cardinal lease expires this year, leading the owners to reconsider uses for the real estate, sources said.

Officials at Cornerstone were traveling and unavailable for comment.

Cornerstone, based in Hartford Conn., has a portfolio that spans just about every sector of real estate. But with the property entitled for office development and the current low vacancy rates in that sector, a redevelopment that maintains the office use but expands and improves the property would be most likely.

The vacancy rate for office properties in the San Fernando Valley was just 5.6 percent as of the first quarter of 2007, according to data from Grubb