Tarlton Wins Big In Silicon Valley
Tarlton Properties CEO John Tarlton is on top of his game, and that was before he went on an insane 3,000-mile bike race, from Oceanside to Annapolis; his Menlo Business Park is leasing up a storm, and we've got the scoop on some freshly-signed ink.
Kidder Mathews' Gregg Domanico and Mary Hines recently completed two new leases totaling 13k SF with Topera Medical and StemCell Theranostics, a Stanford University Start X company. Existing tenant Avalanche Biotech raised a bunch of cash and is expected to expand into an additional 8k SF. (Unlike real life, when these "kids" grow up, you want them to stay in your house.) John expects to complete even more leases this summer at Menlo Business Park (below). Get this: he calls himself a race rookie, though he's been training for five years for the Race Across America (RAAM). Tarlton employees lent a helping hand by driving support vehicles and making sure he had food.
John's capitalizing on the proliferation of small life science companies trickling out of Stanford, offering small spaces on the shorter term to help them get off the ground. (Corporations may be people, but corporations can't find a place to crash for a few weeks using Airbnb.) If a company grows up in Mission Bay, he explains, they will want to stay there when they get bigger. Similarly, he's seeing demand for larger blocks of Silicon Valley space coming from companies already in his Menlo Park and Palo Alto portfolios.
John raised money for the Stanford Cancer Institute. (His mother and sister have fought cancer.) Here he's crossing the finish line with his son John by his side. On his home turf, John's racing to expand, recently acquiring another property on O'Brien Drive. And he's in the application process with the city to redevelop a number of buildings in Tarlton's portfolio. That's the way to go since there aren't a lot of greenfield opportunities in the area, he says. He calls the density and height restrictions in Menlo and Palo Alto a two-edged sword: he'd love there to be more opportunities to expand his portfolio; then again, it does keep upward pressure on rents.
In all, John rolled through 12 states and 350 communities in June. As a solo rider, he completed the race in 11 days and 21 hours, riding between 250 to 350 miles a day with only 90 minutes of sleep per day. (The 90 minutes you spent pretending to like soccer—that was his entire night's sleep.) We hope John devoured a hot dog or two this past weekend, guilt-free and meat-free; he's a vegetarian.
