Kilroy Breaks Ground on 350 Mission St., San Fran Office Tower

By Scott Baltic, Contributing Editor

In the latest milestone for the 145-acre redevelopment area around San Francisco’s new Transbay Transit Center, Kilroy Realty Corp. broke ground Tuesday on 350 Mission St., a new office tower that will rise at Mission and Fremont streets, directly across from the transit center.

The building has been fully pre-leased to Salesforce.com, a provider of enterprise cloud computing, since the project was first announced last fall. It’s scheduled to be completed in early 2015.

The LEED Platinum glass-and-concrete tower is currently set for 27 stories, Mike Sanford, the REIT’s senior vice president/Northern California, told Commercial Property Executive, but he’s confident that approval for a final height of 30 floors will be granted within a couple of months. At that height, the building will total about 450,000 square feet.

Partly because it closely adjoins a building at 50 Beale St., the new tower has a side-core design and no windows on its northeast side, Sanford said. The design will also help create large floor plates with more contiguous open space.

The four-story, open-air lobby will feature a 45-foot-high, 75-foot-wide LED “digital media canvas” (a media wall rather like a Jumbotron, Sanford saidd) that will be used primarily for public art.

And in another unusual feature, the tower’s 11-foot exterior glass walls won’t be perfectly vertical, but will instead cant slightly in or out on alternate floors, Sanford added. Beyond the architectural effect, the benefit is that although this allows as much light in as vertical glass would, the slight angle will reduce solar loading.

The 350 Mission St. groundbreaking is the latest event in a flurry of activity in the Transbay district.

CPE recently reported that Hines and Boston Properties had closed on their purchase of the 101 First St. site, where construction will begin this summer on what will be the West Coast’s tallest building, the 60-story, 1.4-million-square-foot Transbay Transit Tower.

And just a day later, CPE reported that Jay Paul Co. had acquired the 181 Fremont St. project from SKS Investments and would begin construction of that 54-story, 684,000-square-foot mixed-use building.

The vacancy rate for Class A space in San Francisco’s South Financial District is 9.4 percent, according to first-quarter figures from Jones Lang LaSalle.

The South Financial District “has experienced significant growth over the past three years as a result of the flourishing technology industry,” Julia Georgules, JLL’s research manager for Northern California, told CPE.

High leasing activity in the SOMA submarket “has resulted in low vacancy and few options for tenants,” she added, so the South Financial District has become the next best location for tech companies.

These companies, according to Georgules, are driving San Francisco out of the recession, with forecasts pointing to continued hiring over the next several years. This being driven in part by tech start-ups that prefer to locate in the city “rather than in the suburbs where after-work activities and amenities are lacking,” she said. 

“The South Financial District has space currently and, with several new developments under way, will be able to offer nearly 5 million square feet over the next few years,” Georgules concluded.

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