Did Torrance Rents Drop After Toyota Moved Its Headquarters Out in 2017?

Published July 15, 2026

Toyota moved about 3,000 jobs to Texas by 2017, but the data does not show a lasting rent drop in Torrance. Here is why.

No, not in any way that shows up clearly in the rent data today. Toyota announced in April 2014 that it would relocate its North American headquarters, and roughly 3,000 Torrance based jobs, to Plano, Texas, with the move completed by 2017. Torrance rents did not collapse afterward. Sares-Regis Group bought the 117 acre campus, more than 2 million square feet of office and industrial space, for about $270 million in October 2017 and is redeveloping it into a business park projected to hold up to 4,000 workers, which appears to have offset much of the job loss.

What actually happened

Toyota's 2014 announcement was one of the bigger single employer stories in South Bay history. The company's North American headquarters had sat on South Western Avenue in Torrance for decades, and the relocation to a new Plano, Texas campus consolidated Toyota's US sales, marketing, engineering, and manufacturing management functions in one place, according to the company's own announcements at the time and coverage from the Los Angeles Business Journal. By the time the move finished in 2017, Torrance had lost thousands of white collar jobs that had anchored demand for nearby apartments and single family rentals for a generation.

That is the part of the story that gets repeated most. What gets left out is what happened to the real estate itself. Sares-Regis Group, an Irvine based commercial developer, purchased the vacated 117 acre campus in October 2017 for a reported $270 million, according to Bisnow and Commercial Property Executive. Sares-Regis has said the redeveloped campus, branded in phases as Torrance Commerce Center, could ultimately house upwards of 4,000 employees once fully built out, more than the roughly 3,000 jobs Toyota moved to Texas.

Why rents did not fall off a cliff

A single employer leaving a city rarely crashes that city's rental market on its own, and Torrance is a good example of why. A few things cushioned the blow.

First, replacement demand arrived faster than a lot of owners expected. The Sares-Regis redevelopment brought new industrial and office tenants onto the same footprint, and South Bay's broader employment base, especially aerospace and defense work at Northrop Grumman, Space Systems Command, and nearby contractors, kept renter demand diversified rather than concentrated in one employer.

Second, Torrance rental demand was never solely a Toyota story. The city sits inside the same commuter shed as El Segundo's aerospace corridor, the LAX employment base, and the Port of Los Angeles and Port of Long Beach logistics economy, all of which pull renters toward Torrance regardless of what happens at any single office campus.

Third, Southern California's structural housing shortage does a lot of the work. When one source of demand softens, the region's persistently tight vacancy rate tends to absorb it quickly, because there are more renters competing for units than there are units available almost everywhere in LA County.

What the data can and cannot tell us

We want to be precise here rather than overstate our case. Isolating the exact rent impact of one employer's departure, net of every other factor moving the market at the same time, interest rates, new supply, migration patterns, is genuinely hard to do with publicly available data, and we have not found a clean before and after rent index specific to the Toyota exit that isolates that single variable. What we can say confidently is that Torrance rents today sit well above the national median, and there is no visible multi year rent collapse in the years following the 2017 move that would suggest the campus's vacancy dragged the broader city market down with it.

What this means for you

If you own rental property in Torrance, the lesson is not that employer departures do not matter. It is that a diversified local job base, plus a persistent regional housing shortage, is what protects your rent roll when any one employer leaves. Concentration risk is real when a smaller submarket depends on a single major employer; Torrance was large and diverse enough to absorb this one.

If you want someone watching which employers are expanding or contracting near your property so you are not caught flat footed, that is what we do.

This is general information, not legal or tax advice. Confirm with a licensed professional before you act.

Sources

Last verified: July 2026.

Topics: market, torrance, employer-risk, south-bay, rent-trends

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