Bridge Development Partners has broken ground on a 534K SF logistics building in East Oakland, the industrial developer said this week.
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The project, called Bridge Point Oakland, will rise on a 23-acre site at 5441 International Blvd. with an expected delivery in Q3 2021.
Development at the East Oakland location was long pursued for development by General Electric Co., despite contamination from several hazardous chemicals left over from the site's manufacturing history. Last year, GE partnered with Bridge, which said it received approval from the California Department of Toxic Substances Control to start site remediation and worked with the Environmental Protection Agency to clear the way for new development.
After being picked by GE to come on as the site's developer, Bridge bought it from GE for $37.85M last year, according to Reonomy’s property database.
The project itself, which is being marketed to potential tenants by CBRE senior vice presidents Kevin Hatcher and Robert Ferraro and Senior Associate Austin Hinder, has already attracted "overwhelming" interest, Hatcher said.
“It’s hard to be more bullish than we are on this particular project, in terms of the initial response from the market," he said.
"We’ve seen a number of very successful developments, a lot of which we’ve been involved in on the landlord side, come out in this cycle," he added. "This one is at the top of the list in terms of location parameters, being close to San Francisco, the Port of Oakland, 4 or 5 miles from the Oakland airport and a couple blocks off I-880."
Bridge Point Oakland's groundbreaking follows several big deals that showed the strong demand for industrial properties in the East Bay.
Earlier this year, Amazon leased a combined 1.2M SF across two properties in Hayward and Richmond, The Registry reported in May. The e-commerce giant has also leased space in Fremont at Pacific Common South, with that underway project having just over 1M SF of a total 1.7M SF already spoken for, the Mercury News reports.
In Q1, the East Bay's 25 largest industrial leases totaled about 3.9M SF, with third-party logistics and e-commerce tenants representing 70% of that total, according to CBRE.
The industrial sector has largely weathered, and in some cases benefited from, recent pandemic-induced economic upheaval as consumers opt for deliveries more often. Industrial REITs finished June up 2.3% year-to-date, compared to the overall REIT average of -13.3%, according to Nareit.
Bridge Point Oakland, which will have 36-foot clear ceiling heights and 85 dock doors, is the largest industrial project under development in Oakland and the largest up for grabs for a single tenant in the Bay Area, Hatcher said.
It marks the second Bay Area development for Bridge, which is based in Chicago. It broke ground on its first, Bridge Point Silicon Valley in Milpitas, in January, and has since agreed to lease about 388K SF of that to Amazon, the Silicon Valley Business Journal reported in April.
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