The sponsor, Gemdale USA, will use proceeds to refinance existing debt.
By Samantha Rowan
Breakthrough Properties and Tishman Speyer have joined forces to originate a $90 million mezzanine bridge loan on Aperture Del Mar, a newly built Class A life sciences campus in San Diego, PERE Credit can reveal.
The sponsor, Gemdale USA, will use proceeds to help refinance existing debt on the four-building lab and office campus in Del Mar Heights. The loan is not a pure refinance in the traditional sense, given the senior lender stayed in, according to a spokesperson for Breakthrough Properties and Tishman Speyer.
The financing comes as Breakthrough Properties and Tishman Speyer are seeing strong risk-adjusted opportunities in the credit arena for high-quality life sciences properties, the spokesman said. Breakthrough Properties was formed in 2019 as a joint venture between Tishman Speyer and Bellco, a biotech investment firm.
In originating the loan, the partners benefited from the combination of Tishman Speyer’s origination capabilities and credit platform with Breakthrough Properties’ life sciences expertise in analyzing the lab infrastructure and credit quality of biopharma end-users, the spokesperson added.
Behind the loan
Aperture Del Mar is the headquarters for Neurocrine Biosciences, a biopharmaceutical company dedicated to discovering, developing and commercializing life-changing treatments for patients with under-addressed neurological, psychiatric, endocrine and immunological disorders. The company occupies the entire campus on a lease that runs through 2036.
PERE’s Lending Barometer has tracked three other life sciences loans in the US this year involving a private real estate fund manager, including a $465 million commercial mortgage-backed securities financing funded by JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs on a San Diego property owned by Breakthrough Properties.
Breakthrough Properties originated the loan out of its second life science fund, which held its first close at the end of 2025, while Tishman Speyer allocated capital via its debt platform.
The Breakthrough fund has always had a portion with the potential to invest in debt, with the firm seeing the potential for attractive risk-adjusted returns, the spokesman said.
Tishman Speyer, meanwhile, can acquire loans in the secondary market and originate new commercial real estate loans tied to institutional-quality residential, industrial, life science, office and other mixed-use projects and portfolios across the major US markets.
“Our debt platform is designed to identify credit opportunities by drawing on Tishman Speyer’s decades of real estate expertise,” added Randall Rothschild, global head of debt at Tishman Speyer.
Outlook
Although the life sciences sector has been working through oversupply for the past two years, demand for space is now stable and new construction is more disciplined, according to a June report from JLL.
The Chicago-based advisory is also tracking a trend in which tenants are moving into newer, higher-quality buildings, citing data in which buildings completed over the past six years have seen availability drop by 2.6 million square feet over a nine-month period. In contrast, properties constructed prior to 2000 have seen about 700,000 square feet of space returned to market, JLL found.