With the announcement that CAA is buying ICM Partners on Monday morning, the question of what will happen to each agency's precious office property across the street in Century City arose.
The Hollywood Reporter quoted CAA president Richard Lovett as saying that the companies will “all be in one location together as soon as time allows,” implying that one or both will have to break long-term contracts. (The merger will not be completed until later this year.)
According to a July story in the Los Angeles Business Journal, CAA negotiated a four-year lease renewal for its 2000 Avenue of the Stars and Century Plaza Towers premises. The total area is 302,911 square feet. Century Park, which houses the offices, is a 14-acre three-building complex with services such as a fitness center, dry cleaners, banks, and pharmacies, and has been home to CAA since 2007.
ICM Partners' headquarters are only around the corner at 10250 Constellation Blvd., where they have had unique signage on the top five levels of a 35-story Century City skyscraper since an expansion in 2016. ICM has a 10-plus-year lease on the 112,000-square-foot building, which houses more than 200 agents and executives and an estimated 400 overall personnel. If ICM wanted to relocate its employees, it would have to find a way out of that lease. It has been on the seventh, eighth, and ninth floors of the Johnson Fain Partners-designed skyscraper since 2007.
According to Century Park's website, two office spaces (one at 26,000 square feet and the other at 31,000 square feet) will open up in 2000 Avenue of the Stars in the coming months, but neither will be large enough to accommodate hundreds of new employees, even if layoffs are planned. If CAA chooses to grow this manner, the North Tower at Century Park has many vacancies, including several entire floors.
CAA and ICM have not resumed in-person work as a result of the pandemic, and have not established definite return-to-office dates because the Delta variant has pushed back their previous intentions for a summer or early fall return.
