Opus West Expanding Its Opus Center Sierra Point Office/R&D Campus
Opus West said it will develop early next year two new buildings totaling 448,200 square feet of new class A office space at its Opus Center Sierra Point office/research and development campus off Highway 101 in Brisbane, Calif., about 10 miles south of San Francisco.
One building will consist of 10 stories and about 250,000 square feet; the other, eight stories and about 200,000 square feet. The buildings will bring the 120-acre commercial campus to a total of 1.5 million square feet. Architectural services will be provided by Opus Architects & Engineers and Hoover Associates, while in-house Opus West Construction will serve as general contractor. The two structures will be designed to qualify for LEED certification, Opus West said.
BT Commercial has been tapped to handle leasing activity.
Opus West hopes to capitalize on Brisbane’s overall vacancy rate of below 1 percent for R&D and industrial properties, as well as a drop in the direct average vacancy rate – from 15.4 percent in the first quarter to just over 13 percent in the second quarter, according to the real estate services firm Cornish & Carey Commercial.
Opus West is the Phoenix-based unit of the Opus Group of Minneapolis. Opus West has developed more than 49 million square feet over the past three decades, with another 10 million square feet in planning or development phases.
With New Lease, ImmunoGen Plans HQ Move from East Cambridge to Waltham, Mass.
ImmunoGen will relocate its headquarters within Massachusetts from East Cambridge west to Waltham, after signing a lease for 88,930 square feet at 830 Winter St. The 182,106-square-foot building is now fully leased.
The ability to locate ImmunoGen’s research and administrative offices on a single floor of a single building attracted the developer of anti-cancer therapeutics to 830 Winter. “ImmunoGen is excited to have the opportunity to bring all of our research operations into a single facility along with our corporate offices. We think 830 Winter Street is ideally suited to our needs and will provide us high-quality lab and office space for many years,” said Daniel Junius, the company’s chief financial officer, in a statement announcing the deal.
Richards Barry Joyce & Partners is the exclusive leasing agent for 830 Winter St. Three of the firm’s professionals, Michael Frisoli, Ron Friedman, and Jonathan Varholak, represented the owner of 830 Winter St., Intercontinental Real Estate, a real estate investment and management services firm in Brighton, Mass. ImmunoGen was represented by T3 Advisors, a real estate brokerage and consulting firm with East Coast offices in Waltham.
"The scarcity of opportunities in Cambridge, which was created by the tremendous growth of Greater Boston as a hub of biotechnology, has helped fuel the growth of biotech in the suburbs," Varholak said in the statement.
Expansion Makes Promotech the Largest Tenant at Colorado Tech Center
Promotech, a provider of sales and marketing services to pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, will expand its presence at the Colorado Tech Center in Louisville, Colo., to about 200,000 square feet after signing a lease for an additional 93,000 square feet.
The expansion is the fifth for Promotech since it moved into the tech center in 2003. The latest expansion will allow the company to expand its full-time work force from the current 80 employees to about 100, Warren Merlino, executive vice president of Promotech, told the Daily Camera of Boulder, Colo.
Promotech, a division of Somerset, NJ-based inVentiv Health, is the largest tenant at the tech center, located off Colorado State Highway 42.
The expansion will allow for an increase in Promotech's warehouse, distribution, and office space, Merlino told the Daily Camera.
The lease deal wrapped up a busy month for the tech center. On Aug. 3, the Boulder County Business Report reported that two limited liability companies controlled by Stephen Meyers, CTC Commercial I and II, purchased two vacant properties totaling about 5.7 acres — 2051 Dogwood St. and 185 S. 104th St. — for a total $763,900 from Colorado Tech Land Company. Two vacant buildings totaling 32,000 square feet are planned for the properties.
SEGRO Expands French Operations into Lyon
British-owned Slough Estates Group continued its expansion in Europe, announcing last month the acquisition of a portfolio consisting of 538,196 square feet of warehousing and light industrial buildings on 24.7 acres located near the St. Exupéry international airport in Lyon, France.
Most of the eight buildings acquired by SEGRO are at the Satolas Green Business Park, developed between 1998 and 2002 and located 0.9 miles north of the airport; two of the buildings are within the airport limits. The units are all warehousing and light industrial type buildings accounting for 18 percent of total office content in the region. Tenants include the French headquarters of US-owned medical products company Stryker, the freight transporter Danzas DHL Air & Ocean, and the global transportation and logistics business Dimotrans.
SEGRO is buying the portfolio from a subsidiary of British-owned Longbow and the Apollo Real Estate Fund for €42.5 million ($58.1 million) at an initial yield of 6.7 percent, rising to 7.5 percent as the current vacancy is let up, with the potential to increase its land holdings further.
Until now SEGRO's French portfolio has been almost entirely centered in Paris. The company said it moved into France's second major real estate market because it was attracted to the site as well as to the Lyon region, where demand has increased for light industrial space. The region already offers direct access to the French regions of Grenoble and Marseille, while the Lyon airport’s high-speed TGV train will link to Turin, Italy, and Barcelona, Spain, starting in 2010.
“We see excellent opportunities for our product in the French regional markets and Lyon in particular, which we have identified as a one of the key European economic clusters where we want to expand our business,” said Walter Hens, SEGRO executive director and the company’s managing director of continental Europe, in a company statement announcing the acquisition.
The deal, announced Aug. 20, came about three weeks after SEGRO unit Slough Estates USA closed on a $2.9 billion sell-off of its US portfolio of life science properties to HCP, formerly Health Care Property Investors [BioRegion News, Aug. 20].
HCP acquired SEUSA’s roughly 5.2 million square feet of space in 83 properties in South San Francisco and San Diego County.
The deal also included SEUSA’s development pipeline of 3.8 million square feet the company had committed to build in both regions; as well as another 3.3 million square feet in as-yet-unscheduled future development phases in South San Francisco and San Diego County.