SAN DIEGO—Sorrento Mesa's central location and diverse tenancy have a magnetic effect on traditional and biotech users, who will be drawn to Pacific Technology Park, Cushman & Wakefield's executive director Jeff Chiate tells GlobeSt.com. As we reported earlier this month, the firm has been named exclusive agent for the sale of the park, a five-building, 31-acre industrial asset here, and Chiate, Jeffrey Cole and Jeff and Ed Hernandez, based in the commercial real estate services firm's Irvine, CA, office, are heading the assignment. The property includes 544,000 square feet of class-A hybrid flex/R&D and warehouse/distribution space in a corporate-business-park environment. At the same time, it is broken into three distinct parcels, enabling future individual building sales. We spoke exclusively with Chiate about what makes this property special and what makes the Sorrento Mesa market consistently strong.

GlobeSt.com: What stands out for you about Pacific Technology Park?

Chiate: Its scale, for one thing. It's one of the largest projects on the market right now, and with the amount of capital looking to place money, we're getting a lot of traction. It's also a pretty unique park in that you've got traditional industrial units and also buildings up front that are creative office. The broad spectrum of buyers is looking at this property, from traditional core buyers through value add looking to reposition it. As units become vacant, they will convert to creative office or biotech space. REITs and pension-fund buyers are interested, while the value-add/repositioning groups tend to be typically more local operators. This is in tune with the local dynamics of the Sorrento Mesa market, which has seen a lot of recent conversions to creative office and biotech. It's rare to have this diverse a buyer base looking at this project.

GlobeSt.com: Has Sorrento Mesa traditionally been a strong office submarket?

Chiate: It has. It's one of the strongest markets in the San Diego area. It's strong because of its centralized location for both biotech and traditional office.

GlobeSt.com: How would you characterize the product available and the types of tenants that are attracted to this submarket?

Chiate: This park is a good example. It's got traditional warehouse industrial space all the way to flex or creative-office space. If you take a look at some of the tenancy in this park, it's high quality, with more than half of them credit tenants—that's pretty rare. It's also a pretty broad base of tenancy.