King Street Properties, which specializes in life science real estate in the Northeast, is expanding to the West Coast, eyeing opportunities in the Bay Area, Seattle and San Diego for lab and biomanufacturing projects.
The Boston-based firm, which has offices in New York and North Carolina, tapped Sonia Taneja to lead its westward expansion, it said this week in a statement. Taneja most recently served as senior vice president at Spear Street Capital, a San Francisco-based office landlord, and has more than 16 years of commercial real estate experience, the firm said. She’ll oversee King Street’s Bay Area investments and will also assess opportunities in other regional markets, including San Diego and Seattle.
The firm will undertake a search for an office in San Francisco, according to the San Francisco Business Times, which earlier reported King Street’s expansion plans. It’s looking for opportunities to create “best-in-class lab and biomanufacturing” workplaces, Taneja told the newspaper.
“This is a combination of research and development space, but also biomanufacturing, which doesn’t really have an organized marketplace for builders in the U.S. for doing that,” she said.
The Bay Area, San Diego and Seattle are among the nation’s top life science clusters, and the need for labs and biotech buildings hit a new high during the pandemic. In the Bay Area, demand significantly outweighs existing supply and is expected to remain steady for the foreseeable future, making it one of the most attractive life science real estate markets in the short and long term. That’s attracted out-of-state investors like Harrison Street Real Estate Capital and Oxford Properties Group to the region, and King Street is the latest one seeking a piece of the action.
King Street is scouting for investment opportunities in San Francisco, the Peninsula, the East Bay and potentially parts of the Bay Area traditionally considered outside of its northern and eastern boundaries, Taneja told the Business Times. It said in September that it partnered with a Brookfield Asset Management real estate fund to pursue life science real estate investments across the U.S. The partnership plans to invest about $1.5 billion in equity capital toward King Street’s lab property pipeline, which totals more than 2 million square feet.
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