$164M San Diego Life Science Campus to Break Ground

The Boardwalk plaza. Rendering courtesy of CBRE

Healthpeak Properties will break ground next Thursday on The Boardwalk, a 195,000-square-foot Class A lab and office campus in San Diego, Calif., according to a statement by leasing agent CBRE. The $164 million life science development within walking distance of the University of California, San Diego, is expected to welcome its first occupants as early as the second quarter of 2021.

Located at 10265, 10275 and 10285 Science Center Drive in the Torrey Pines community north of downtown, The Boardwalk will encompass three adjacent buildings across two land sites. The project will entail 110,000 square feet of ground-up development on both sites of an existing 85,000-square-foot property, which will be redeveloped.

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The existing building, located at 10275 Science Center Driver, was built in 1997 and acquired by Irvine, Calif.-based REIT Healthpeak from Ligand Pharmaceuticals in 2006. Amenities of the new project, just west of Interstate 5, will include a 5,000-square-foot fitness center, café, conference center and one-acre park with outdoor meeting spaces.

The Boardwalk will be designed too achieve LEED certification and is projected to generate an estimated yield on cost of 7 percent upon stabilization, Healthpeak disclosed in a statement last month. Jed Stirnkorb, Rich Danesi and Andrew Huggett with CBRE serve as the leasing agents for the new project.

Booming biotech hub

Healthpeak owns more than 25 million square feet of R&D and office buildings across the U.S. as well as additional development projects in Boston and South San Francisco, Calif., in various stages of entitlement.

San Diego is frequently ranked as one of the top biotech markets in the U.S. Biotech space accounts for 19.2 percent of the city’s 80.3 million-square-foot office inventory, according to a JLL report issued last September, a figure that is projected to rise to 21 or 22 percent by 2022 as more lab projects come online.

The Torrey Pines area has historically been home to the greatest amount of lab supply, with more than 5.9 million square feet at present.