Tanner Larson joins after seven years at Kilroy in the San Francisco Bay Area
Developer King Street Properties has hired Bay Area broker Tanner Larson as it continues to beef up its life sciences portfolio on the West Coast.
Larson is moving over to the Boston-based real estate firm from Kilroy Realty, where he spent seven years, most recently as vice president of leasing. At King Street, he’ll serve as a director in the company’s California offices, where he’ll support the “ongoing growth of the firm’s West Coast life science portfolio” by assisting with leasing, asset management, acquisitions and financial analysis across its properties in the San Francisco Bay Area and San Diego, the firm said in a press release.
“Tanner brings deep market knowledge and strong industry relationships to support our current portfolio and help us grow strategically,” Sonia Taneja, a managing director and King Street’s west region market lead, said in a statement.
In 2022, King Street kicked off its life sciences expansion in California with a two-property portfolio purchase in Burlingame in a deal valued at around $45 million, and set about redeveloping the Bayshore Highway site into a 300,000-square-foot life sciences development. In 2023, King Street Properties began a phased redevelopment of a newly acquired San Diego property at 5825 Oberlin Drive as a speculative lab and life sciences property it acquired from Nuveen for $36 million.
This year, the firm purchased another San Diego property, the Esplanade, a 241,963-square-foot life science campus in the University Town Center area.
Among biotech property landlords, tenant retention was top of mind last year, as vacancies continued to increase well above historical standards, reaching 24% in San Francisco, 27% in Boston and 17% in San Diego – the three largest life science hubs based on research and lab inventory – according to a life science report from brokerage Cushman & Wakefield. Owners of biotechnology properties were focusing on higher-end real estate to increase their chances of signing life science companies to leases during a time of weakened demand for the industry.
However, the San Francisco Bay Area’s life science real estate market has rebounded in the first months of 2025 following a difficult few years, Senior Director of Costar Market Analytics Nigel Hughes noted in a recent analysis. An upturn in leasing activity, combined with a slowdown in the construction pipeline, has stemmed the rise in the sector’s vacancy rate, resulting in the highest level of positive net absorption of the past five years.
King Street, which specializes in life sciences real estate, says it continues to expand in California, complementing its core markets in Boston/Cambridge, New York City and Raleigh/Durham.
Tanner during his career has executed tenant commitments in excess of 500,000 square feet of space in the Bay Area, King Street said. He helped lead the development of Kilroy’s sprawling Oyster Point project, a SO-acre waterfront campus in the life sciences hub of South San Francisco, and the 54,000 square-foot conversion of an underutilized Bay Area asset into life science suites, the firm said.
He attended Brown University and worked as a ski instructor in Vermont for three years.
From Rachel Scheier at CoStar News