A heavyweight biotech developer has emerged as the buyer of a two-building Silicon Valley office campus, cementing its role in the Bay Area life science market and extending a yearslong streak of high-profile acquisitions.

Phase 3 Real Estate Partners, a San Diego-based firm with an extensive portfolio in and around the San Francisco area, purchased the roughly 247,000-square-foot Skyway Landing campus in San Carlos, California, for $102 million, according to local property records. CoStar News previously reported that Los Angeles-based investor Hudson Pacific Properties had sold the properties, but the identity of the buyer was not known at the time of the deal.

With a Bay Area portfolio spanning just shy of 30 million square feet, Phase 3's latest purchase at 959 and 999 Skyway Road signals an ongoing interest among investors in greater San Francisco, the nation’s second-largest biotech hub after Boston.

It's among several national biotech developers, including Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Longfellow and IQHQ, that have scaled up their property acquisitions and development pipelines over the past five years to meet rising demand for life science space in the Bay Area.

The purchase price was about $412 per square foot and is less than the $104 million, or about $423 a square foot, that Hudson Pacific paid when it acquired the complex nearly seven years ago.

Tenant and developer interest in traditional office space continues to fall from pre-pandemic records.

That comes as the biotech industry is the primary source of leasing, investment and construction activity across the region and in other previously top-tier office markets such as Seattle and Boston.

Life sciences tenants collectively leased more than 3.7 million square feet of space last year, according to data from CoStar and Kidder Mathews, and vacancy rates have fallen below 4%.

By comparison, the average vacancy rate for office space in the San Carlos area has climbed past 17%, according to CoStar data.

It isn't yet clear what Phase 3's plans are for the San Carlos complex, with no formal planning documents filed and the developer not immediately responding to CoStar News' requests to comment.

But the firm has a significant track record of office-to-lab conversions that have become increasingly popular throughout the Bay Area.

The San Diego developer is behind a 17-story research and development project in nearby South San Francisco and it recently completed the 721,000-square-foot Genesis Towers project, which sold in 2020 for $1 billion.