Principal Real Estate Investors is making a comeback at Menlo Business Park, becoming a 90% investor in the 50-acre biz park. Nearly 30 years ago—when the 900k SF property delivered—Principal was an original investor before selling out in '99. (It's sort of like how we're buying Bruce Springsteen albums for the first time in decades.) The new capital lets developer Tarlton Properties bolster the tech at the property and do more complex life science build outs. Tarlton wants to capture the southern shift of the biotech epicenter towards Stanford by housing those startups spawning out of academia.

The park's largest tenant is Acclarent, a division of Johnson & Johnson. Tarlton recently developed Menlo Labs, two buildings in the park that act as an incubator for early stage life science companies. Startups can lease a single small lab, as tiny as 250 SF, month-to-month. Tarlton and Principal have a JV to acquire older industrial buildings outside the biz park and reposition them as life science buildings, and Principal's reinvestment aims to build on that partnership.