Bay Area Life Science Project Lands $400M Loan

Marina Genesis. Rendering courtesy of JLL

Phase 3 Real Estate Partners Inc. and Bain Capital Real Estate have scored a more than $400 million construction loan for Genesis Marina, a purpose-built life science campus underway in California’s Bay Area. Barings LLC provided the financing for the roughly 570,000-square-foot waterfront project in Brisbane, on the southern border of San Francisco.

A JLL Capital Markets team of Tim Wright, Todd Sugimoto and Daniel Pinkus represented the borrower in the financing deal. Located at 3000 to 3500 Marina Blvd., Genesis Marina is slated for delivery in the first quarter of 2023, according to the project website.

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Phase 3 Real Estate Partners broke ground on the Class A, three-building development last year and recently began to install indicator piles, the company revealed in a social media post about a month ago. The 8.7-acre site along Highway 101 will give rise to a LEED Gold-designed property with efficient floorplates of about 35,000 square feet and direct access to the Bay Trail walking and cycling path along the water.

The upcoming project forms part of the Genesis life science portfolio, a collection of properties across the booming biotech markets of San Francisco, San Diego and Boston. Phase 3 also partnered with Bain to build Genesis South Francisco, a 796,572-square-foot campus less than a mile to the southwest of Genesis Marina. Completed in 2019, the campus featuring a 21-story tower was sold to an affiliate of Ventas Inc. last October.

Robust demand

The financing opportunity for Genesis Marina “attracted a tremendous amount of interest” amid buoyant demand for trophy life science developments, JLL’s team noted in a statement. The project is among the newest Class A biotech campuses to arise in San Francisco’s life sciences cluster, which has 4 million square feet of development under construction, according to the brokerage’s 2020 outlook report on the sector.

The Bay Area’s life sciences market continues to thrive even as pandemic-related disruptions batter the office market. Last month, Oxford Properties paid $172.7 million for a mixed-use building in Berkeley that the Canadian real estate investment giant plans to convert into lab space.

That acquisition came shortly after Longfellow Real Estate Partners snapped up a nearly 250,000-square-foot office campus in San Mateo for $156 million, with plans to transform the entire asset into a life science property.