November 21, 2016

Alexandria is still working on plans for 2 buildings on Eastlake Avenue

Image by CollinsWoerman [enlarge]

All the permits are in place for this office/lab building at 1165 Eastlake but it won’t start until the city rebuilds the Fairview Avenue North bridge.

Alexandria Real Estate Equities has announced various plans for two properties it owns on either side of Eastlake Avenue East, but no dirt has been moved yet.

Most recently, working with architect CollinsWoerman, Alexandria proposed two projects across the avenue from each other, at 1150 and 1165 Eastlake.

But both of those projects have run into delays because of city infrastructure projects, according to Alexandria's John Cox.

All the permits are in place for the site at 1165 Eastlake. That plan is for a four-story building with about 88,000 square feet of office and lab space above parking for 81 vehicles. BNBuilders will be the general contractor.

The site is now mostly used for parking, but one building there — the 1909 Gunn Building — will be demolished.

Alexandria paid $4.8 million for the 32,000-square-foot property in 2006.

Cox said the project has been delayed because the city plans to rebuild the Fairview Avenue North bridge on the Lake Union side of 1165 Eastlake.

“The bridge's gonna be replaced,” said Cox. “That's a big, big infrastructure project. Fairview is gonna be shut down.”

SDOT is budgeting about $27 million for the rebuild, which is tentatively scheduled to begin late next fall.

Alexandria is waiting for completion of that year-long project before starting 1165 Eastlake because traffic will be rerouted from Fairview to Eastlake.

In the meantime, Cox is actively looking for biotech tenants. “No one's signed yet,” he said.

Alexandria's plans for 1150 Eastlake have been hindered by the discovery of a storm-sewer pipe. Originally, Alexandria had CollinsWoerman design a 10-story building for tech tenants, and asked the city to consider a partial street vacation of East Nelson Place on the north end of the site. East Nelson dead-ends at Interstate 5.

However, in surveying the site, Alexandria discovered that a big storm sewer pipe runs down the middle of East Nelson. Cox said the street vacation no longer makes sense because the city needs access to the pipe.

As a result of these changes, Alexandria has submitted to the city new plans from a different architect, Gensler. This plan would also put a 10-story building on the roughly 35,000-square-foot site, which Alexandria bought from ZymoGenetics in 2008 for $11.8 million. The building would have five levels of underground parking, plus street-level retail. A small industrial building on the site would be demolished.

Work on 1165 Eastlake won't likely start for two or three years, he said. Work would start on 1150 Eastlake after that.

But the Pasadena-based REIT is already busy in Seattle.

Alexandria is currently developing Alexandria Center, an 11-story biotech building at 400 Dexter Ave. N. that is expected to open early next year with 287,000 square feet. Juno Therapeutics will make its headquarters there, taking about 90,000 square feet.

Alexandria currently has about 750,000 rentable square feet in five properties in the Eastlake-South Lake Union area, and 30 million square feet nationwide.

It owns the historic 1914 former Seattle City Light steam plant, home to ZymoGenetics. Its other SLU tenants include Gilead Sciences, the University of Washington and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

A recent biotech/life sciences market report by Jones Lang LaSalle estimated the SLU vacancy rate in that sector is 2.6 percent.

JLL expects Alexandria Center be fully leased when it opens. Here's what the report said about SLU: “Expect continued downward pressure on vacancy, which will in turn keep rental rates escalating in the area.”