Owner of Emeryville office complex plans pair of life science projects there

Emeryville may get a pair of life science projects.

Oakland’s Harvest Properties has early plans for a 210,000-square-foot research and development building that would join a trio of structures at the East Bay city’s Bay Center Office complex, the San Francisco Business Times said. It also intends to add Class A labs to one of the property’s two office buildings, each of which contains 128,500 square feet, Harvest’s Tom Wagner told the newspaper.

“We’re just trying to figure out exactly what we can build and the economics,” Wagner said. He described plans for the new research facility to the Business Times as “very preliminary” and declined to disclose cost estimates or a timeline. His firm hasn’t filed a formal development application, Miroo Desai, a senior planner at the city of Emeryville, told the newspaper.

Bay Center Office at 6425-6475 Christie Avenue, owned by a joint venture of Harvest and Principal Financial Group, is composed of a pair of office buildings and an 84,000-square-foot lab that’s fully leased to a single life science company, Wagner said. Once Harvest, which manages the complex on behalf of the venture, finishes adding labs to the office property at 6475 Christie Avenue, it will be able to accommodate a single tenant or multiple smaller ones, he said.

The complex is within a mile of three other projects that would add about 764,000 square feet of offices and labs to Emeryville, one of the nation’s fastest-growing life science clusters, the Business Times said. The city’s vacancy rate for such property was about 2 percent as of August, and more developments like the one Harvest has planned will be needed to meet demand.

[San Francisco Business Times] — Matthew Niksa

Read more

San Francisco

Longfellow buys Emeryville building for $36M to expand life science project there

San Francisco

DivcoWest buys site of South SF life science conversion for $165M