Wareham Development Corp Sells Marin County Medical Offices

A pair of creekside medical office buildings in Marin County sold for more than $24 million last month, according to public records.

Bay Area-based Wareham Development Corporation sold the two offices at 2 and 18 Bon Air Road in Larkspur to Anchor Health Properties, a Charlottesville, Virginia-based real estate investment trust, for $24.1 million.

MarinHealth leases both buildings for specialty outpatient services. At a combined 27,300 square feet, they fit into a larger constellation of medical offices in the area, which includes a regional hospital. Marin Health is under lease until 2031.

San Rafael-based Wareham Development, which is known for its focus in developing life science buildings, had owned the properties for decades.

The building at 2 Bon Air Road was once a Safeway grocery store, which Wareham renovated into a large medical office in 1991.

The second building, across a parking lot at 18 Bon Air Road, had been a fast food restaurant before Wareham’s redevelopment into an outpatient facility in 2004.

Caroline Reynolds of JLL said the $881-per-square-foot price was high but ultimately incomparable to other North Bay office sales as the buildings represent “highly specialized” outpatient facilities.

A source close to the deal told The Real Deal that the location had much to do with Wareham’s motivation to sell.

Started by Rich Robbins in 1977, Wareham Development’s portfolio dots the Bay Area, but the main hub sits in the East Bay, with large research campuses in Berkeley and Emeryville. The source said Marin County, where Wareham has one other property, stretched the company’s orbit too far.

Wareham Development partner James Goddard said the sale would provide revenue to reinvest into the firm’s other Bay Area campuses.

“This was an asset that we had owned for many decades. As our portfolio has grown and expanded, it became a geographically isolated project,” Goddard said. “Now was an opportune time to sell and reinvest the funds into our large format campus locations in the East Bay and in the Stanford Research Park in Palo Alto.”

The company made headlines in February when it announced plans to sell Berkeley’s historic Fantasy Studios.

Known as “The House that Creedence Built,” the more than 121,000-square-foot complex had hosted recording studios where bands such Creedence Clearwater Revival, Santana, Joan Baez and Green Day all cut records. The studios closed in 2018.

Robbins, who owned the buildings since 2007, had planned to turn the property into a life sciences research lab, but ditched those plans.

Anchor Health Properties did not return requests for comment. The Virginia-based company owns and manages 150 healthcare facilities across the country, including a maternal care facility in Burlingame, leased by Sutter Health.