When Presidio Bay Ventures took over the Springline mixed-use development in Silicon Valley months after the pandemic's outbreak, the project faced a number of challenges that likely would have appeared insurmountable for most other investment firms. Three years later, however, Presidio's bet is clearly paying off.
The 6.4-acre mixed office, retail and residential development has created a bustling downtown area for Menlo Park, California, home to major tech giants including Facebook parent company Meta. Within about two years of taking over the project, Presidio brought both the office and retail space at the project from empty to fully leased, a feat that helped the project garner a 2023 CoStar Impact Award, as judged by real estate professionals familiar with the market.
To help lure workers back to physical office space, Presidio focused on landing a mix of popular Bay Area restaurants and brands by offering the Springline space at comparatively affordable rates with lease terms that included generation subsidies. Restaurants Che Fico, Burma Love, Barebottle, Andytown and Canteen all signed leases to expand their footprint to the Silicon Valley project, deals that Presidio Managing Director Cyrus Sanandaji said helped attract the project's office tenants, such as Wells Fargo and Norwest Venture Partners.
"Obviously, there was a huge question, or series of questions, around what the future would look like, let alone the future of the office," Sanandaji previously said about the project. "We have been really focused on destination placemaking. You have to view the project more holistically and realize that from a placemaking-strategy perspective, having an incredible lineup of restaurants and bars and activation is really going to start driving meaningful increases in rent on the commercial side, on the office side and residential side."
About the project: The $650 million transit-oriented development includes 200,000 square feet of high-end office space across two buildings along with 183 residential units, ground-floor retail and underground parking for 942 vehicles. An iKnightscope security robot patrols the property around the clock, while a separate Bbot robot lets office and residential tenants order from multiple Springline restaurants at once. The project even has its own app, which provides tenants data about their carbon footprint using built-in sensors and software to measure their environmental impacts.
What the judges said: "Springline truly changes the area around it," Hans Hansson, a CoStar Impact Awards judge and Starboard Commercial Real Estate president, said of the mixed-use project. "It is in an extremely difficult location to navigate the development process, but this produced results during a recession."
They made it happen: Presidio Managing Director Cyrus Sanandaji is spearheading the project along with help from residential management firm Align Residential, architecture firms BAR architects and Huntsman Architectural Group, BCII Construction, WL Butler, creative marketing agency Brand Bureau and JETT Landscape. CBRE brokers Laura Sagues and Alex Sagues managed retail leasing at Springline, while Newmark brokers Christian Prelle, Mike Courson, Cassidy Zerrer and Clayton Jones managed office leasing for the project.
