Alexandria closes on main part of San Bruno mall for 2M sf campus project

Alexandria Real Estate Equities sealed a deal to acquire the heart of San Bruno’s Shops at Tanforan and plans to combine it with two other parts of the mall it owns to create a two-million-square-foot campus.

The Pasadena REIT closed on the main part of the mall after disclosing the deal in a regulatory filing last month, the San Francisco Business Times said, citing an unidentified person with knowledge of the transaction. It’s unclear how much the company paid to buy the 15-acre site at 1150 El Camino Real from Queensland Investment Corp.: The deal doesn’t appear on the San Mateo County Clerk-Recorder’s Office’s website and Alexandria didn’t respond to the Business Times’ request for comment.

It’s also unclear whether the shopping center’s Target store, which shares the same address as its main part, was included. Queensland owns the Target, according to Old Republic Title records.

Alexandria paid $105 million to acquire a JCPenney store at the Shops at Tanforan in September and spent $128 million to buy the mall’s Sears in November. The developer’s latest purchase means it now controls virtually the entire 44-acre mall site, the Business Times said.

It plans to combine the main part of the shopping center, which has more than 80 shops and eateries, with the Sears and JCPenney properties and redevelop them to create a campus of two million square feet of “future development opportunities,” it said in a Jan. 5 regulatory filing.

The city of San Bruno envisions at least 1,000 new homes sprouting on the redeveloped Shops at Tanforan land, which could be joined by a biotech campus and innovation hub. It aims to launch the site’s planning and environmental review processes by the early part of this year and adopt a master plan by next summer, the San Mateo Daily Journal reported in August.

[San Francisco Business Times] — Matthew Niksa

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