Commercial Real Estate Blog

The San Mateo City Council on Monday approved the site plan for the Bay Meadows race track. The 84-acre site in San Mateo is slated to be developed into approximately 95,000 square feet of retail, 15 acres of parks/open space, 750,000 square feet of office space, and about 400 new residential units.

Bay Meadows Land Company, which is owned by StockBridge has been working on the Bay Meadow project for years. The Friends of Bay Meadows group, which has and continues to battle the redevelopment plans, may still seek to further delay the project through litigation. Ultimately I don’t think there exists enough horsepower (pun intended) to stall this project for too much longer. In fact, an economic downturn is more likely at this point to delay the ground breaking than anything else.

Coming on the heels of its recent $150M purchase of the San Tomas Business park, NVIDIA is working to put the pieces in place to develop approximately 2,000,000 square feet of office and R&D space on the site. The park and an adjacent 11-acre piece consists of 475,000 square feet of office and R&D space spread across 10 buildings on 25 acres. The project sits directly across the street from NVIDIA’s existing headquarters campus, which it is leasing from Sobrato until 2012.

Harvest Properties, which sold the site to NVIDIA, previously had plans itself for developing 2,000,000 square feet of Class A office space. The project entailed half a dozen buildings and parking garages, the tallest of the planned buildings being six stories. As of last month, the Business Journal reported that nobody was willing to comment on the development plans, but we’ve learned that NVIDIA is in fact pursuing development of the site.

Update: This job posting on NVIDIA’s site confirms the project is in fact moving forward:

The owner of the Savoy Hotel in London, Prince al-Walid bin Talal, is proposing a Mile High Tower in a sea port town near Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. This building, if it is even possible, would be more than twice the height of its nearest competitor.

Estimated to cost approximately $10 Billion dollars to construct, this building will likely put all engineering theories to the test. I can’t even begin to think how the engineers will handle issues such as counterweights and building systems.

On a personal level, I think this is as just excessive and completely unneccessary. I wonder what the carbon footprint of this thing is. I’d hate to have to calculate that too.

The San Francisco Building Inspections Commission voted in favor on enacting new green building requirements. The requirements would require almost all commercial buildings (those bigger than 5,000 square feet) to comply with LEED standards. In addition, residential structures exceeding 75 feet in height and other buildings in excess of 25,000 square feet must also comply with LEED standards.

The new guidelines will need to be signed into law by the Mayor, but he has indicated that if they are passed by the Board he would do so. It should be noted that the new building requirements would not be fully implemented until 2012.

These requirements will likely become codified in more and more cities over the next several years.

Under current law, only 2.5% of a improvement costs to a commercial (or residential) property could be written off in the first year. The new economic stimulus package now allows for up to 50% of the improvement costs to be written off the first year provided the work is started and completed this year.

This will likely spur some activity both on the leasing front as well as construction front as Landlords and Tenants both will seek to take advantage of the favorable tax treatment.

Federal Realty, the owners of Santana Row have announced plans to build a 5-story office and retail project on a one-acre site within the complex.

The building will feature 4-stories of office in a 15,000 SF floor plate above 15,000 SF of ground floor retail. The steel construction building is estimated to cost approximately $42M and is anticipated to be complete by the end of 2009. The parking is already tight in Santana Row so FRIT (Federal Realty) has intentions to add a 90 car parking garage to what will likely be exclusive parking for the office tenant(s).

Rents have not yet been announced but based on the construction costs, it can be safe to assume that office lease rates will likely be at or north of $3.50 NNN.

In Singapore, the Nanyang School of Art has taken the definition of green building to another level. The building features a verdant turfed roof which doubles as a functional space people can use and access via sidesteps along the roof edge.

The roof helps lower roof temperature as well making this design both functional as well as environmentally friendly.