Latitude 33 Moves to New Scripps Ranch HQ

When Latitude 33 executives had to find a new location for its headquarters, they didn’t have to go far.

The 30-year-old company recently bought a two-story building across the street from the Scripps Ranch building that it had been leasing, and recently moved into it after spending about $3 million renovating it.

“It was a complete gutting of the inside, so it required a lot of work,” said Latitude 33 CFO Kris Taylor.

“Our prior space was outdated, and it didn’t really match the personality of our company, and when I say the personality of our company, we are a very young, active social crowd,” said Matt Semic, president and principal of Latitude 33.

Latitude 33 bought its new 18,000-square-foot headquarters building at 1073 Treena St in 2022 for $4.3 million from Coseo Family Five, LLC, after searching for about two years, Semic said.

The company occupies about 14,000 square feet of the building, leasing the rest to others.

“Scripps Ranch, where we had been for eight or nine years, was actually very much a central spot for our staff, and nobody wanted to leave just because we happened to be on a perfect street with walkability and proximity to freeways and staff from Vista and San Marcos all the way down to La Mesa and further south,” Semic said. “Ironically, we were able to find a building off market two doors down.”

Fun culture

When Latitude 33 bought the 1980s-era building, it was “a whole bunch of little office spaces” with an exterior staircase and a central breezeway, Semic said. “We enclosed one full side of the building, creating an exterior glass wall of glass that’s lighted at night.”

Acoustic tiles that had covered the ceiling were removed, to create a more open feel and expose wooden beams and the mechanical works of the building.

A central staircase was added inside, along with sliding glass doors that lead from a kitchen and break room with a bar to an outdoor patio of about 1,500 square feet with various games to create “a real fun space for our staff and clients to gather and mingle and have meetings and do fun stuff,” Semic said.

The building entrance leads to a living room of sorts, with a conference room of about 30 square feet as the central focus of the ground floor.

“You walk in and it’s a big display piece for us,” Semic said.

A separate entrance was created for the company’s survey department on the ground floor.

“We specifically wanted that access for them to park their trucks right up next to their entrance, come in, unload into their storage room,” Semic said.

Although the overall feel on the first floor is wide open, there are also some private offices in little pockets around the perimeter.

“We have a lot of spaces broken out for people to have breakout meetings or passively gather for impromptu meetings or have formal meetings, and we have all kinds of flex furniture that people can move around,” Semic said.

The second floor has more conventional office space, but it, too, has a living room and a coffee bar, although the design is meant to encourage people to wander downstairs and mingle.

“Everybody here is just so approachable and enjoys being around each other,” Taylor said. “Truly, it sounds like I’m just saying it, but people say that all the time, this is just such a culturally fun company.”

Along with renovating the work areas, the company added a gym and lactation suite for new mothers.

RBN Design designed the interiors of the renovated building. BNBuilders was the general contractor.

Adding offices

Founded in 1993, the company has about 30 people working hybrid schedules in San Diego with a total staff of about 50 companywide.

In addition to moving its headquarters, Latitude 33 recently opened offices in Sacramento and Salt Lake City.

The company’s San Diego County projects include working on the new Terminal 1 at San Diego International Airport, the new San Diego County Youth Transitional Campus in Serra Mesa, and the University of California San Diego’s Hillcrest medical campus.

When it started, Latitude 33 focused primarily on residential projects, but Semic said that the company broadened its reach following the Great Recession when the housing market imploded.

“We realized in the mid-2000s, you should probably be a little more diverse when the housing market crumbled overnight,” Semic said. “We’re starting to see some momentum back in that market being slightly resurrected and we’re still very much in residential as well, more urban infill, smaller scale projects than single family homes, but we’re still doing a lot of single-family homes on the I-15 corridor in Bonsall and Fallbrook and areas farther north.”

Latitude 33 Planning & Engineering

Founded: 1993
Headquarters: Scripps Ranch, San Diego
President and principal: Matt Semic
Business: CRE planning, engineering and surveying
Employees: 60
Annual revenue: $15 million to $30 million
Website:  www.latitude33.com
Contact: 858-751-0633
Notable: Serving the region’s largest employers and civic institutions, Latitude 33 has worked on many of San Diego County’s highest profile projects, including planning and engineering of the new Terminal 1 at San Diego International Airport.