San Francisco

One of San Francisco’s most high-profile residential projects recently announced that the leasing process for units has commenced. Tower Two at One Rincon Hill, an iconic luxury tower, now has homes ready for lease, with unit occupancy slated to begin this August. According to the official statement announcing the move, private tour appointments are now available via online registration and by calling the development’s Welcome Center.

The New Home Company recently opened a Welcome Pavilion at its latest master-planned Silicon Valley master-planned residential community. The Orchard Park housing development in San Jose is set to display model homes and hold the initial sale phase at the community located near the intersection of Old Oakland Road and East Brokaw Road in the city’s Berryessa District.

Alexandria Real Estate Equities, a company that focuses on a dominant market presence in the state-of-the-art, highly collaborative urban science and technology campus, has added yet another property to its portfolio. The company recently acquired the property at 500 Townsend Street in San Francisco for a reported fee of around $50 million. The development site is set to provide the entity with an opportunity to further expand its current assets in the South of Market area.

A San Jose Home Depot Store recently traded hands in a deal worth $15.575 million. The transaction was arranged on behalf of the seller, an institutional investor, by real estate investment services firm Marcus & Millichap. The deal was handled by Mike James, an associate vice president Investments with the company’s Encino, Calif. office.

Harvest Properties, one of the more active companies in the San Francisco Bay Area office market, has reportedly made another large acquisition. The company, along with joint venture partner LaSalle Investment Management, paid a fee rumored to be in the vicinity of $100 million for a two-building office complex in San Mateo, Calif. The joint venture acquired the property from seller Fisher Investments with whom a lease-back deal has already been arranged. Earlier this year, Harvest and Invesco Real Estate sold Parkside Towers, a 400,000-square-foot office complex, to Heitman in a deal worth about $200 million.

The San Francisco Bay Area’s growing appeal is substantially improving the region’s office sector. The fact that the top three tech markets in the country are all located here, San Francisco, The Peninsula and Silicon Valley, is evocative of investor confidence, and as a result, development and asset acquisitions have ramped up during the past few years.

A new affordable housing project is set to near reality after the City of Emeryville announced that it had picked the company that would handle an important project for the community. According to a recently released press statement, Emeryville local authorities have selected EAH Housing, the oldest nonprofit housing management and development organization in the western US. EAH then went on to select the architecture firm that will provide the design for the project, and the developer settled on KTGY Group, Inc.