It has been a busy year for San Francisco-based Presidio Bay Ventures, and the company just spent $34 million to acquire a 4.7-acre site in San Carlos at 642 Quarry Road where it plans to develop a 410,000 square foot commercial property and an adjacent 1,230 car garage.
The property, which is located at the corner of Old County Road and Quarry Road, is part of a newly redeveloped neighborhood known as East Side Innovation District, which is within a mile of the Belmont Caltrain Station. Presidio’s project is looking to create a transit-oriented development, which will demolish the existing structures on the property and create two, six-story buildings and a 10-level garage structure. One of the buildings is projected to be 216,290 square feet and include 10,000 square feet of amenities. The second building will be slightly smaller at 193,520 square feet with a 5,700 square foot childcare and cafe facilities. The garage will have a basement and include surface-level parking with eight additional stories.
The DES Architects-designed campus will be highly amenitized with facilities that will serve both tenants and members of the general public, according to the project plans filed with the city. The campus is designed to be warm, open and inviting with public space that extends from the intersection of Quarry Road and Old County Road through the project site to Belmont Creek, stated the firm in the document.
Overall, the development team took cues from its conversations with San Carlos city staff and the public stakeholders, and it emphasized creating significant usable open space at the street corner that extends into the project site and invites the public into a safe and enjoyable outdoor environment.
“The corner plaza will have a park-like feel activated by the building lobbies and cafe amenities. The central open space celebrates Belmont Creek with a new creek-side trail connecting to Old County Road and the central open space. The generous street frontages provide enhanced pedestrian and bicycle facilities to encourage alternative modes of transportation, connections to Belmont Caltrain and downtown Belmont, while preliminary landscaping concepts have been inspired by structures and shapes that occur in the natural world, as a way for the project to pay homage to the deepening relationship between the City and the life sciences industry,” said the development team in its proposal.
The development marks another chapter in what has already been a very active year for Presidio Bay Ventures. Earlier this year, The Registry reported that the company kicked off a spec development in San Carlos at 777 Industrial Road. The lab space/R&D project will have a total development cost in the range of $130 million to $140 million, according to the property owner, and it will look to reshape the landscape of this city’s burgeoning biotech space.
“We are starting this project on a speculative basis with no tenants. We do feel good about the market demographics given the kind of space that we will be bringing to a market this is in very high demand from a tenant perspective,” said K. Cyrus Sanandaji, founder and managing director of Presidio Bay Ventures at the time the development kicked off.
The project has a number of institutional sources of capital on both the debt and equity sides of the development. On the debt side, the company has been able to obtain a $118 million construction loan on the development provided by New York City-based Square Mile Capital Management. Presidio Bay also has a private family office trust that is its institutional equity joint venture partner on the project.
A year ago, in January of 2021, Presidio closed on $120 million in construction financing to develop the Ventana Residences located at 99 Ocean Avenue in San Francisco’s Outer Mission and Excelsior District. Ventana Residences will offer 193 new rental residences including 48 onsite Below Market Rate units, tripling the number of new affordable units created in the Excelsior district in over 10 years. With a mix of studio, one-, two-, and three-bedroom floor plans, the development will serve the area’s diverse community of families, students and working professionals, the company said in a statement.
