SAN FRANCISCO—Students from the University of California at Berkeley's Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics and a handful of SIOR Northern California chapter docents recently took a bus tour of some of the area's projects in varying stages of construction. The tour consisted of 47 Cal students and six SIOR representatives.
The first stop was the Oakland Global Logistics Center near the Port of Oakland. A Prologis development, the logistics facilities and distribution center is being built in three phases, totaling up to 678,000 square feet. The first building is 256,216 square feet and was completed last year, while the second phase is 200,000-plus square feet and is currently under construction. Mark Maguire of Colliers International is one of the listing brokers representing Prologis and was the docent for this leg of the tour.
The next stop was San Francisco's CBD where the group had access to 181 Fremont's upper-most floor, a residential penthouse still under construction. The Jay Paul Company mixed-use development opened in 2017 while its 55 luxury condos on floors 39-57 are still under construction. The building is 802 feet tall.
In September 2017, Facebook leased 436,000 square feet there to house between 2,000 and 3,000 Facebook and Instagram employees across 33 floors. It is the company's first location in San Francisco.
About half of the group went to the top of the new Salesforce Tower, a Boston Properties (95%) and Hines LEED Platinum project. At 61 floors spanning 1,070 feet and 1.4 million square feet of total space, it is the second tallest building west of Chicago. The tower cost in excess of $1 billion to build.
The building will be 67% occupied this year and fully occupied by next year. Most of the office space is preleased and eventual tenants in addition to Salesforce are WeWork, Bain & Company, Accenture and CBRE.
There will be fifth-floor retail and park with a pedestrian bridge. This will provide direct access to the new Transbay Transit Center, which is under construction next door and will connect eight Bay Area counties through 11 transit systems.
Steve Colvin, senior vice president of property management for Boston Properties' West Coast portfolio, talked about the building's innovative features such as its heating and cooling system with fresh air on every floor, and 100% recycled water including waste water. Load-bearing columns go 42 feet into bedrock, GlobeSt.com learns.
The group gained access to the top-most section where natural air and cooling fans work to disperse heat from the building, and eventually an LED art installation will be featured on the outside of the building, GlobeSt.com learns. That floor is only accessible for maintenance work and off-limits to the public other than the occasional tour.
Mike McCarthy, Colliers International, talked about the San Francisco office market during the ride to Mission Bay. Here, the new Golden State Warriors arena–Chase Center, is under construction and scheduled to open in time for the 2019-2020 basketball season.
Terezia Nemeth, senior development officer with Alexandria Real Estate Equities, spoke about her 20-year history developing Mission Bay from a mostly vacant industrial wasteland into a transformed 303-acre neighborhood anchored by UCSF's offices, a new hospital, life science companies, office buildings, condominiums, apartments and retail properties. Alexandria is the master developer of both Chase Center and UBER's new headquarters.
Representatives from Mortenson Clark, general contractor for Chase Center, presented a virtual tour of the construction before the group headed to a parking structure rooftop for a view of the arena under construction as well as the new UBER campus.
“This was a really great tour that offered unprecedented access for future potential real estate professionals to existing professionals that spanned industrial and office brokers, developers, a major commercial contractor and an architectural firm–the full gamut of the built environment,” says SIOR Northern California Chapter 2018 president John Hans, Rossetti Company. “In addition, the students were able to see some of the iconic San Francisco properties that are shaping the skyline.”
The SIOR Northern California Chapter, along with matching funds from SIOR Foundation, is sponsoring Cal's Undergraduate Real Estate Club with programming and scholarship grants. The chapter is also working with Sacramento State University with similar programs and grants. The bus tour event was a follow up to SIOR's first event with Cal, which featured a “town hall” career development panel with SIORs, a developer and students last fall.
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Lisa Brown
Lisa Brown is an editor for the south and west regions of GlobeSt.com. She has 25-plus years of real estate experience, with a regional PR role at Grubb & Ellis and a national communications position at MMI. Brown also spent 10 years as executive director at NAIOP San Francisco Bay Area chapter, where she led the organization to achieving its first national award honors and recognition on Capitol Hill. She has written extensively on commercial real estate topics and edited numerous pieces on the subject.
