University of Michigan Plans for Los Angeles Campus

The University of Michigan is setting up shop in Downtown Los Angeles.

The Ann Arbor-based institution is moving its West Coast campus for its Ross School of Business to The Grand LA at 100 South Grand Avenue, L.A. Business First reported.

The satellite campus will occupy 20,000 square feet on the third floor of the mixed-use complex in a lease valued at $11.2 million. With this expansion, The Grand LA will add classrooms, conference rooms, workspaces and indoor and outdoor event areas dedicated to Michigan Ross.

Prior to landing on The Grand, brokers with Axiom Retail Advisors found more than 60 possible sites for the university to plant a flag.

The Grand will offer a permanent home for Michigan Ross’s Executive Master of Business Administration program after more than a decade of the school’s West Coast students hopping around to various hotels. When UMich first started offering business classes in L.A. in 2012, it was hosting students from Friday morning through Saturday afternoon once a month over a 20-month period at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills.

“The university has operated its Executive MBA program in Los Angeles since 2012 and was seeking a long-term space to scale up that and other programs,” Axiom broker Paul Bartlett, a Michigan Ross alum who facilitated the find, said in a statement, per Connect CRE. “After several years operating out of hotels downtown and on the Westside, the Michigan Ross Executive MBA program had grown to the point that leadership was ready to commit to a permanent West Coast presence.”

When picking a spot, the university required things like accessibility to LAX, proximity to full-service hotels — such as the one housed in The Grand — and dedicated outdoor space for students. It initially chose Los Angeles as the site of its breakout campus in 2012 because of the kinds of business workers that live there.

“We considered what I call destination cities in the U.S. that would be large and have a strong mid-career population,” former Michigan Ross Dean Alison Davis-Blake told Fortune in 2012. “L.A. has a lot of young and mid-career executives at the right age, and we have a large number of Michigan alums who are eager to help us with this.”

Classes are set to start at the new outpost early next year.

— Chris Malone Méndez