A Folsom commercial property owner is experimenting with offering startups and entrepreneurial companies flexible office and manufacturing space in a unique light industrial building in the city’s Lake Forest Tech Center.
A third of the Flex Space Folsom property at 140 Blue Ravine Road is being taken as the headquarters of OnSight Technologies, but there is plenty of manufacturing and office space left, said Cole Strombom, with Strombom Properties Inc., an owner of the building.
“We are willing to do short-term leases, 60 to 90 days. A lot of these startups are on a rapid growth trajectory, and they are not in a position to sign a five-year lease,” Strombom said.
His target market is clean technology, research and development work and medical technology companies that need space for office or light manufacturing. Clean tech is an option because the building is plumbed for hydrogen.
Strombom is getting the word out about the availability of the space through Choose Folsom, the economic development group in the city, as well as through the Growth Factory accelerator in Rocklin, the Greater Sacramento Economic Council and Ansync Labs in El Dorado Hills, which offers some startups office space in its location.
“It’s a very unique building. The structure and bones of its have had a lot of investment. It would be very expensive and very difficult to get permits and to build a building like that today,” said Troels Adrian, executive vice president with the Greater Sacramento Economic Council.
The building is wired for high electrical capacity, and is plumbed for hydrogen, both things that are difficult to find in an existing building, Adrian said.
The building was built in 1984 with robust electrical capacity for manufacturing. It was thoroughly updated in 2007 by then-occupant hydrogen fuel cell-maker Altergy Systems. Altergy had capacity to build thousands of hydrogen fuel cells per month at the automated factory, primarily for telecom and data center companies that needed power backup, sometimes in remote locations. Altergy’s assets were sold off in 2022, and the Folsom building became vacant last year.
A typical commercial building needs about 33 amps per 1,000 square feet, which would be about 1,200 amps for a 35,000-square-foot building. The building at 140 Blue Ravine, however, is wired for 4,000 amps, according to its leasing brochure. And that is with just under half of the building set up as open-floorplan office, conference rooms and about 16 offices.
“There is a need for this kind of space,” said Tyler Clark, in finance and business operations with Ansync Labs.
Ansync occupies about 22,000 square feet of space in buildings in El Dorado Hills, which houses everything from mechanical presses, metal milling machines, pick-and-place chip equipment to X-ray inspection devices and software teams. When it has extra office space, it rents it to startups until they outgrow the space. That’s what happened with OnSight, which moved its operations to the 140 Blue Ravine building this month.
Ansync is a 23-year-old contract manufacturer, industrial design and engineering research company whose customers range from startup companies to Fortune 500 corporations. It makes everything from robots, microchip boards, custom touch-screens and light devices to autonomous walk-in medical kiosks and medical devices.
“We see it as stocking the pond,” Clark said of the space that Ansync and Flex Space Folsom offer to startups. “If we help these startups ramp up, we are creating future customers.”
