Developer pays $20M for San Carlos site approved for life sciences project

A Burlingame developer bought a San Carlos parking lot to turn into a life science property as the area heats up for such projects.

Dewey Land paid $20 million for the one-acre site at 1030 Brittan Avenue, between El Camino Real and the Bayshore Freeway, the San Francisco Business Times reported.

The developer is working with MBC BioLabs to build a three-story, 96,175-square-foot life sciences building, for which the property is already entitled. The pair has collaborated before to buy and renovate a building at 930 Brittan Avenue into a 28,000-square-foot life sciences incubator that opened in June 2020.

Life sciences are booming in San Carlos. In June, a 123,000-square-foot life sciences building was approved for 777 Industrial Road on the site of a former San Carlos Honda dealership. Alexandria Real Estate Equities is building a 1.6 million-square-foot biotech campus along Commercial Street and Industrial Road. The company acquired the last piece of land for the project in April 2020 with the purchase of a 12.7-acre site.

Graymark Capital and Nuveen Real Estate recently sold a drug manufacturing plant at 120-150 Industrial Road in San Carlos for $190 million, almost double the $99 million they paid for it in 2019.

California’s state teacher’s pension fund CalSTRS pledged $500 million toward a life sciences fund run by Longfellow Real Estate, which has multiple life science properties across the Bay Area.

San Mateo County is the leader in life science leasing in the Bay Area. According to a report by Kidder Mathews, in the fourth quarter of 2021, the county leased more than 665,000 square feet and had a vacancy rate of 3.5 percent.

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[SFBT] — Victoria Pruitt