One of Larsen Baker's new tenants at The Offices at La Paloma is already a legacy company in Tucson, Arizona's prized innovation hub, which BusinessWeek magazine dubbed "Optics Valley" in 1992.
The firm, NP Photonics, was founded in 1998 by Nasser Peyghambarian, a high-profile figure in the field of optics, a branch of physics that deals with the science and practical applications of light. The discipline is foundational to much of the technology we use today, including lasers, fiber optic cables and much of the infrastructure behind the internet.
A local panel of judges chose the NP Photonics lease as the winner of the 2023 CoStar Impact Award in Tucson because it stood out among the leases signed in Tucson over 2022, a year dominated by logistics properties. The company's cutting-edge nature and contributions to Tucson's technology sector also made a compelling case for the deal.
Peyghambarian is an entrepreneur, inventor and academic who is a professor and the sitting chair of photonics and lasers at the University of Arizona's world-renowned Wyant College of Optical Sciences. Such is his stature that the school created an endowed chair in his honor.
His company, NP Photonics, signed a lease for about 14,500 square feet at The Offices at La Paloma, a two-story building in the Catalina Foothills, according to Larsen Baker, the owner of the property at 3300 E. Sunrise Drive. On its website, Larsen Baker describes The Offices at La Paloma as one of its "flagship" assets.
NP Photonics joins two other tenants there, the national engineering company Kimley-Horn and Clinisys, a technology company that focuses on healthcare data software formerly known as Sunquest Information Systems.
About the property: The Offices at La Paloma is an 82,942-square-foot building at 3300 E. Sunrise Drive, about 10 miles north of downtown Tucson. It was built in 1992.
They made it happen: Two in-house brokers for Larsen Baker handled the deal, Isaac Figueroa and Elaina Elliot. The tenant was represented by Sydney Setnar of JLL, according to CoStar records.
