A choice piece of Kendall Square is back on the market.
The real estate firm Divco-West is selling One Kendall Square barely two years after it purchased the eight-acre complex along Broadway. It’s the latest sign of how hot — and fast — the real estate scene is in booming East Cambridge, one of the priciest office markets on the East Coast.
One Kendall, the nine-building campus of an old hose factory, today is 667,000 square feet of office and lab space with retail, a movie theater, and a 1,500-space parking garage. It’s an unusual opportunity to buy a mixed-use campus, said Matt Pullen, a broker at Newmark Grubb Knight Frank who’s working on the sale.
“There’s global interest in this because of the size of the campus,’’ he said. “Typically you’re selling an office building or a lab or a residential project. This is a whole campus environment.’’
Foreign capital has flowed into Boston-area real estate in recent years as pension and investment funds in Europe and Asia look for stable returns. That has driven up prices for trophy properties to record highs while leading some recent buyers to cash out relatively quickly.
Divco, a San Francisco firm that specializes in real estate for technology and the life sciences, bought One Kendall in early 2014 for $395 million, part of a broader investment in Boston and Cambridge in recent years.
The company spent $24 million on upgrades and attracted some new tenants. Divco has not put a price on the property, Pullen said, but he expects it could sell for about $700 million. On a per-square-foot basis, that would rival the biggest building deals the Boston area has seen in the last year and would top the $889-per-foot price that TIAA-CREF paid for a majority stake in Biogen’s nearby headquarters at 225 Binney St. in Kendall Square.
“Honestly, at this point we’re having a bit of trouble pricing iconic real estate,’’ Pullen said.
And more big projects are coming to Kendall.
Boston Properties plans another 940,000 square feet of development along Binney Street and said it is in “advanced talks’’ with companies to prelease more than half of it for office space. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology continues to advance plans for several new buildings near its campus. And the US General Services Administration says it could release a formal request for proposals to redevelop the 14-acre Volpe Transportation Center as soon as this month.
Tim Logan can be reached at tim.logan@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @bytimlogan.
