San Diego Football Club, Major League Soccer’s newest franchise, recently leased 15,000 square feet of office space for a corporate headquarters at the high-end 2100 Kettner building in Little Italy and is slated to move in this week.
An executive with publicly traded real estate investment firm Kilroy Realty Corp., which owns the property, announced the lease during the company’s Oct. 25 conference call with investors. The deal was confirmed by San Diego Football Club CEO Tom Penn, who declined to share specific lease .
“The chance to establish a corporate, business-operations headquarters was a priority for us,” Penn told the Union-Tribune. “We’re thrilled to land in Little Italy at the brand new 2100 Kettner building, No. 1 for its central location for the entire community. And then No. 2, (because of) the building itself and the neighborhood.”
San Diego’s Major League soccer team, which officially became the league’s 30th franchise in mid-May, is co-owned by Egyptian billionaire Mohamed Mansour and the Sycuan tribe. It will begin play in February 2025 at Snapdragon Stadium in Mission Valley.
The office lease, which was first reported by CoStar, comes on the heels of the team’s brand reveal and ahead of the club’s groundbreaking event for its 28-acre training complex on the Sycuan Reservation, which is scheduled for early November.
The organization will use its Little Italy headquarters to house as many as 100 people in the team’s ticket sales, corporate partnership sales, marketing, community relations, finance and legal divisions, Penn said. The club is eyeing a quick move-in with temporary furniture and shared workspaces. Some staffers are expected to start working at 2100 Kettner as soon as Thursday, Penn said.
The lease was heralded by Kilroy in its most recent earnings report as a harbinger for more leasing activity at the firm’s marquee downtown San Diego property, which remains mostly vacant two years after being completed.
“We signed yesterday a 15,000 square foot lease at 2100 Kettner with the MLS San Diego soccer franchise, and we’re very excited to have them come to the building, and we know that’s going to create more leasing momentum with the discussions we have going on as well as with future prospects,” Kilroy’s Chief Leasing Officer Robert Paratte told investors.
Kilroy’s 2100 Kettner project, which takes up an entire city block in Little Italy, includes 235,000 square feet of office space and ground-floor storefronts and features a public courtyard, some underground parking, multiple outdoor terraces and a large rooftop deck with sweeping views of downtown and San Diego Bay.
The six-story, brick and metal building, completed in late 2021 at a cost of $140 million, marked the developer’s foray into downtown San Diego and is currently Little Italy’s largest office building.
The building was 17 percent leased at the end of September, according to Kilroy’s latest quarterly earnings report. 2100 Kettner has one other office tenant, Boston Consulting Group, which signed a 28,387 square-foot lease last year, said Joshua Ohl, who is the San Diego director of market analytics for real estate tracker CoStar. The company has yet to move in.
San Diego Football Club will be the first tenant to occupy the building, taking over less than half of the 40,000-square-foot third floor. The organization will also have a sign on the top of the building and expects to use the facility to wine-and-dine prospective clients.
“2100 Kettner is a cool building. It also has a shared rooftop with a phenomenal view of the city,” Penn said. “So we really like the presence of our brand in the core of the city, and we’ll be able to hold special events on the roof.”
The organization is also currently preparing to start construction of a $150 million training complex and Right to Dream youth academy around 22 miles away on the northwestern portion of the Sycuan Reservation east of El Cajon. The project is intended as the club’s home base for its sports staff and players. In addition to working at the Little Italy headquarters, operations staffers are expected to work one day a week at the future Sycuan campus, Penn said.
