BentallGreenOak Sells Bay Area Office Asset for $130M

Hollis Business Center. Image courtesy of Newmark

An affiliate of Beacon Capital Partners has acquired a two-building office property in the Bay Area that includes vacant space suitable for a life science conversion. BentallGreenOak sold its Hollis Business Center to the Beacon affiliate for $129.5 million, according to the East Bay Times.

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Hollis Business Center is split into two buildings at 6401 Hollis St. and 1480 64th St. in Emeryville, Calif. Simeon Properties developed the 225,500-square-foot property in 2000. The developer purchased the site that included an old warehouse with an accompanying vacant parcel and constructed a three-story office building alongside a parking structure offering 637 spaces. Simeon Properties also converted the warehouse space into a single-story, Class A office/tech space.

Nowadays, Hollis Business Center has attracted a variety of high-quality tenants including UC Regents and Amazon with its 30,000- to 40,000-square-foot floorplates and has an 84 percent occupancy rate.

Newmark’s Steven Golubchik, Edmund Najera, Jonathan Schaefler, Darren Hollak and Jack Phipps represented BentallGreenOak in the transaction. According to Golubchik, the remaining vacant space offers the new owners an opportunity for a life science conversion.

Bay Area’s demand for life sciences

Golubchik added in his prepared statement that the Emeryville market had a very constrained supply of life science space. Not surprisingly, Newmark saw a lot of interest for the Hollis Business Center from investors looking to break into the area’s life science market.

According to Newmark, the Bay Area’s life science market has 2.2 million square feet of active tenant requirements and an availability rate of 7.2 percent. In the summer, Newmark also arranged $165 million in financing for a 300,000-square-foot life science campus in Emeryville.