Wareham Development In the News

Friday, March 28, 2008
Real estate deals EmeryStation East
Best office lease / Inner East Bay
San Francisco Business Times - by Amanda Bishop San Francisco Business Times Contributor

In July, EmeryStation East was an almost-empty building in search of big tenants. By October, the project was poised to become a national center for alternative biofuels research.

Landlord Wareham Development landed two large tenants within a few months of each other. Amyris Biotechnologies Inc. signed a lease in August for 70,690 square feet and Joint BioEnergy Institute signed a lease in October for 65,000 square feet.

The leases were a gamble for the landlord because at the time they were negotiated, both groups were short on cash. Amyris was banking on a second round of venture funding and JBEI was waiting for a government grant.

"The challenge was how to build an expensive lab for someone trying to build a product," said Bill Nork of Cornish & Carey, a broker representing landlord Wareham Development, of the Amyris deal.

Wareham and Amyris agreed to creative financing involving letters of credit and deposits to seal the deal. Despite the company's startup status, the landlord was impressed by Amyris' track record (it previously developed a low-cost malaria vaccine) and the involvement of Jay Keasling, a well-known chemical engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Plus, Amyris had a track record with venture capitalists, having raised $20 million in its first round in 2006. The landlord had a relationship with the company because Amyris already occupied 25,000 square feet in another Wareham building.

"Essentially the landlord was committed to the deal before the financing was in place," said Matt Elmquist of Aegis Realty and the broker for Amyris. "We were all moving forward under the guise of 'we'll finance this later.'" The month after signing the lease, Amyris said that it had raised the first portion of a new, $70 million round of financing. By December, Amyris expressed interest in expanding by an additional 20,880 square feet.

Just two months after signing Amyris to EmeryStation East, Wareham landed JBEI, a $135 million Department of Energy Bio-energy Research Center. The group, which Keasling also helped to found, is a six-institution partnership led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The space allows JBEI to consolidate space in various academic campuses.

At the time the lease was negotiated, the Department of Energy had not yet announced that JBEI had received a grant for its study of cellulosic biofuels. The grant came through before the lease was signed.

The list of people that needed to sign off on the lease was long, Nork recalled.

"It's always a challenge dealing with the red tape of a government-backed lab venture," he said.

With these two leases and others signed in 2007, Wareham has just 30,000 square feet left in the 245,000-square-foot building.

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http://sacramento.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/stories/2008/03/31/focus8.html

About Wareham Development

Wareham Development is committed to the long-term economic and environmental vitality of the communities where we do business. During the planning process, we work closely with city and state agencies to ensure that each project provides maximum benefit to its surrounding community. And, unlike many developers who build projects only to sell them, we retain ownership of the majority of our developments, many of which have come to define the thriving technology corridor between the Bay and Richmond-San Rafael bridges.

The Wareham vision encompasses the spark and promise of small companies on the verge of growth, and large corporations whose fortunes span the globe. We are proud of our associations with all of our tenants, and feel deeply privileged to play a role in their success.