LaSalle, Harvest JV Buys $35M Mixed-Use Asset
The 126,345-square-foot property has been recently leased to an undisclosed tech company.
By Ariela Moraru
San Francisco—Harvest Properties and LaSalle Investment Management have acquired 1149 Chess Drive in Foster City from Whitney Investments and Woodstock Development for about $35.3 million, or $280 per square foot. Mike Moran, managing principal of Cushman & Wakefield, represented Harvest and LaSalle.
Situated on 5.69 acres, the property includes 67,000 square feet of office space, 18,000 square feet of lab space, and 41,000 square feet of R&D/warehouse/amenity space. The property has four auto-leveling docks, a warehouse clear height of 26 feet, two generators, and power totaling 4,200 AMPs. The building is undergoing a renovation by DES Architects & Engineers that includes a new entrance and landscaping.
Harvest executed an 11-year lease with immediate commencement upon close of escrow for the full 126,345-square-foot office/R&D/lab building. The tenant, an undisclosed artificial intelligence and robotics company, will move its global headquarters just north of Highway 92 in the Vintage Park submarket of Foster City, in between Gilead and Illumina’s corporate headquarters. The asking rent was about $36 per square foot. According to Cushman & Wakefield, Foster City’s office and R&D vacancy rate was 9.6 percent in the fourth quarter.
This off-market transaction is the third recent venture in the San Francisco Bay Area of the partnership between Harvest and LaSalle. The two companies purchased 60 South Market Street, a Class A building in downtown San Jose, in December 2013, repositioned it and then sold the asset in August 2016. In this time, the property’s occupancy increased from 68 to 92 percent.
In April 2014, the partnership acquired the two-building portfolio Century Center in San Mateo from Fisher Investments, in a partial sale-leaseback transaction. Following a complete interior and exterior repositioning of the project that included the ground-up development of a new 3-story structured parking garage, the property sold, fully leased, in September 2016.
Images courtesy of Cushman & Wakefield and DES Architects & Engineers
