ValleyCare Secures Office Building on West Las Positas Boulevard

By George Walsh, Hacienda Network Staff Writer

New Facility to House Physician's Offices and Outpatient Services

The ValleyCare system is a Tri-Valley institution. The non-profit medical organization is well known for not only providing exceptional health care, but for treating patients regardless of whether or not they have insurance coverage or the financial means to pay for their care. The ValleyCare Foundation, which is dedicated to fundraising activities for the ValleyCare system, and the ValleyCare Health Library are both located on site at Hacienda. The ValleyCare Medical Center is nearby with facilities in Pleasanton (directly adjacent to Hacienda) and in Livermore.

The ValleyCare system will soon be complemented by a fourth facility: a 55,868 square foot two-story office building at 5725 West Las Positas Boulevard at Hacienda. The building, initially built and occupied by Hewlett Packard, is currently owned by Nearon Enterprises. Cornish & Carey Commercial acted as leasing agents for the property in the transaction with ValleyCare.

"Our two medical office buildings are completely full," says Vern Brown, vice president of general services for ValleyCare. "We believed that if we were to build a medical office building on our own campus, it would probably take two and a half to three years. We had more and more physicians wanting to come into the Tri-Valley area and there was not a whole lot of medical office space."

The answer to the question of where to find medical office space was solved by John Hone and Paul Sheehan of Cornish & Carey Commercial's Pleasanton office, who helped reposition Nearon's office building on West Las Positas for medical use. In an effort to differentiate the property from other buildings vacated by high-tech companies, Cornish & Carey worked with Nearon to accommodate ValleyCare. The property has many of the elements needed for a medical office building including good visibility, good accessibility, abundant parking, and proximity to the Medical Center.

ValleyCare leased around half the building as of August 9th and will get the balance of the building toward the end of this year, when its current resident, the University of Phoenix, moves to Livermore. The building on Las Positas was a good fit for ValleyCare primarily because of its location. It's about a block and a half away from the ValleyCare Medical Center. ValleyCare will sublease space to physicians wanting to move to the Tri-Valley area and other physician tenants will be moving from the Medical Center to the new building because their practices have grown too large for their current accommodations. Other plans for the new medical building include an outpatient center that provides services such as physical medicine, occupational health, imaging services, and possibly even some conference space.

ValleyCare estimates that there will be about 91 employees in the new building, which could receive as many as 200 patient visits per day. "We're just trying to keep pace with the growth of the Tri-Valley area, Brown says. "I think that the new building gave us an opportunity to do now what otherwise would probably have taken a couple of years."

Photo: (L to R) Neil Sol, Cindy Noonan, Rose Ann Petersen, and Dan Leong of ValleyCare in front of their new facility.

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