We just found out more Bay Area news from San Diego's Westcore: It's prepping to build a state-of-the-art industrial center in Fremont.
This morning, we chatted with CEO Don Ankeny about the long time coming project. His firm bought the aging building complex on Kato Road in spring 2012, waiting on tenants to vacate before demolition. (Now that's courtesy.) One is semiconductor company StatsChip, which negotiated an early lease termination for this summer. Another neighboring building housed a San Francisco spice company, whose founder passed away and the spice and herb distributers have since vacated.
In its place will rise a 350k SF industrial complex. Don thinks the land is more valuable as an industrial development, positioned right off the 880. Westcore has submitted a preliminary site plan for approval. He hopes to start demo work in the next six to eight months, which means the project could be done towards the end of 2015. When it delivers there won't be much like it in that market; the competing product out there is much older, he says. The quality will be in line with the 600k SF Cherry Logistics Center in Newark that Amazon just fully leased, he says (pictured).
Out in Sacramento, Westcore just made a core hire. After finding out Steve McKibben was leaving his role overseeing 6M SF at Reit Management & Research, Westcore pounced. Now eight days on the job, he's in charge of Westcore's Sacramento and Midwest portfolios totaling 10M SF of commercial space as SVP of asset management. Don's learned it's hard to recruit people to move to Sacramento to work, so the fact Steve is a native is perfect (many locals don't want to budge). Why the love for Sacramento? Don says leasing has been ramping up since the recession ended, and it's one of the top five biggest MSAs in the state.
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