Biotech Firm Takes 142 KSF in the Bay Area

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Developer-owner Aralon Properties has leased a speculative 142,000-square-foot office and R&D building in South San Francisco to a rapidly expanding biotech company, the San Francisco Business Times has reported. The development benefited from a $55 million construction loan funded by First Republic Bank, originated in early 2021, according to CommercialEdge data.

InterVenn Biosciences is taking the space at 499 Forbes Blvd. under a 10-year lease, for which Kidder Mathews Senior Vice President Joe Cammarata and Executive Vice President Gregg Domanico represented the landlord.

READ ALSO: Bay Area’s Life Science Boom Under the Microscope

InterVenn currently occupies about 20,000 square feet at 2 Tower Place, also in South San Francisco, and reportedly will be keeping that space. The biotech company, only five years old, focuses on technologies for the early detection and treatment of diseases like cancer, such as a blood test intended to predict how a specific cancer patient might respond to various immunotherapies.

The 499 Forbes property includes a four-story, 265-lot parking garage. The site reportedly was purchased by Aralon for close to $10 million in 2018.

Lively market

In April 2021, Oxford Properties Group acquired a mixed-use building in Emeryville, Calif., for $173 million, with plans to convert part of the property into lab space. The 402,700-square-foot building, at 3100 San Pablo Ave., had originally been a factory.

The following month, Phase 3 Real Estate Partners Inc. and Bain Capital Real Estate landed construction financing for a three-building life science campus in Brisbane, Calif. The project, dubbed Genesis Marina, will total about 570,000 square feet.

The San Francisco Bay Area’s life science market “continues to experience aggressive industry expansion by its occupancy base,” according to a first-quarter report from Cushman & Wakefield. In fact, the report adds, demand has outstripped supply in most Bay Area submarkets by two to one, despite the delivery of 7.9 million square feet in the past half-dozen years.

The resulting landlord-favorable conditions have driven rents to an average of $68.16 per square foot, Cushman & Wakefield reported.