King Street buys $43M property on peninsula for life sciences office

King Street Properties, expanding into the nation’s second-busiest life sciences market after its home base of Boston, paid $45.2 million for a Burlingame office building.

King Street used an affiliate to buy the building at 1499 Old Bayshore Highway, the Mercury News reported, citing documents filed last month at the San Mateo County Recorder’s Office. On its website, the firm says it aims to redevelop the property into a Class A life science office campus of 300,000 square feet with parking, public outdoor space, and a café.

The company, which said earlier this month that it would push into the Bay Area, Seattle and San Diego to capitalize on the region’s life sciences boom, has also proposed a 485,000-square-foot office campus, with Helios Real Estate, blocks away at 1699 Old Bayshore Highway. The company hired Sonia Taneja from Spear Street Capital to lead its West Coast expansion and is working with Brookfield Asset Management to scout for investments in life science properties.

Commercial deals involving life sciences have topped those of tech companies. KKR spent $1.1 billion on a life science complex in Mission Bay, one of the few available lab spaces in the area. BioMed Realty paid Oracle $160 million for offices and vacant land at the border of Belmont and Redwood City, consisting of 200,000 square feet of existing space with life science conversion potential.

Asking rents for life science properties in the Bay Area jumped 90 percent from 2016, according to Newmark data. Vacancy rates dropped to 5.6 percent in the first half of this year from 8 percent at the end of 2020.

[Mercury News] — Gabriel Poblete