BUILDING BOOM FORECAST FOR AREA.

Byline: Gregory J. Wilcox Daily News Staff Writer

Before the new year could even begin, an influential commercial real estate company predicted Thursday that 1999 will kick off a massive construction spurt that will add the equivalent of Orange County to the five-county Los Angeles Basin by 2010.

Growth will be spread throughout the region with big jumps expected in the San Fernando and Santa Clarita valleys, Ontario and Orange County, concluded the report from The Seeley Co.

Already, construction is heating up around the San Fernando and surrounding valleys. After recession killed commercial and industrial construction during the middle of the decade, a construction upturn that began in '98 is expected to turn into a construction boom in '99 and beyond.

For example:

A sprawling, 1.3 million-square-foot campus-style office complex with up to nine buildings is planned for a 35-acre site in Warner Center where Prudential Health Care has its western regional headquarters.

Lennar Partners, a unit of Miami-based LNR Property Corp., recently bought the land at the northeast corner of Canoga Avenue and Burbank Boulevard and is willing to spend more than $200 million on the development. It will be the most ambitious project proposed for the Warner Center area during the past decade. Plans call for existing buildings to be torn down so the net amount of expansion at the site will be about 800,000 square feet.

20th Century Industries, one of the largest employers in the Valley area, recently broke ground for a $100 million, 273,000-square-foot office tower next to the company's headquarters in Woodland Hills. The 11-story building is expected to be completed in December.

The largest single development ever proposed for Los Angeles County - the massive, 12,000-acre Newhall Ranch in the Santa Clarita Valley - won unanimous approval from the Board of Supervisors in November.

Not only does the project include 21,615 homes, which are expected to house more than 60,000 people, but it also includes plans for 5 million square feet of commercial and industrial space. Construction is expected to start in 2001.

More people, more jobs

In fact, about half of the job growth predicted in the Seeley report will occur in Los Angeles County, in part because of residential expansion of the Santa Clarita Valley. The rest will come in Ventura and Orange counties, and the Inland Empire.

``About two-thirds of the growth will be in areas like the Santa Clarita Valley, southeast Orange County and the Inland Empire, areas which are not yet built out,'' said Dennis Macheski, Seeley's real estate economist.

The Greater L.A. area - which includes Los Angeles, Ventura, Riverside, San Bernardino and Orange counties - is expected to swell by 3 million people, or 18 percent, in the next decade Employment is expected to grow by more than one million jobs, or 16 percent.

To accommodate that growth, the region will have to build enough industrial buildings and commercial space to equal an Orange County: that's 55 million square feet of office space, 200 million square feet of industrial space, about 100 million square feet of retail space and more than 1 million housing units, according to Seeley.

This kind of growth ``is going to tax the infrastructure and it's going to require more transportation facilities,'' said Ted Gibson, chief economist for the California Department of Finance.

But Seeley officials said the region can accommodate the seemingly overwhelming amount of construction if planners and developers concentrate on refurbishing older facilities rather than carving new projects out of undeveloped land.

``As older properties get to a certain point they are either changing their uses or they will be torn down and new buildings built for higher and better uses,'' said Michael Ross, a senior vice president and managing director of the company's investment division. ``And major investors always look at old aerospace plants. A lot of those plants are starting to be used for different purposes.''

Construction growth

Gibson said Seeley's forecast of construction growth might be conservative considering that it projects an annual growth rate of just under 2 percent. Gibson's department is predicting that jobs will grow slightly faster in the decade between 2000 and 2010.

The service industry is expected to lead the job gains.

Entertainment industry jobs will grow at a still rapid 3.2 percent annually, Seeley reports, which is still much less than the recent 8 percent annual growth.

About 75 percent of the office expansion over the next decade will be in Los Angeles and Orange counties with most of Los Angeles' growth expected on the city's Westside.

But the San Fernando Valley will get its share, too, Seeley said. There is about 1 million square feet of space now under construction in the tri-cities area of Burbank, Glendale and Pasadena, and that should swell to 10 million square feet over the next 10 years.

The rest of the Valley's commercial space will expand by about half that rate.

Meanwhile, manufacturing jobs will continue to decline slightly, a trend that dates back to the 1950s when the local aerospace industry first started its retraction. Output, though, will increase because of better worker productivity.