CAMBRIDGE, MASS. — An affiliate of Longfellow Real Estate Partners has received $51 million in recapitalization financing for a laboratory/biotechnology building located at 1030 Massachusetts Ave. in Cambridge. Greg LaBine of HFF placed the five-year, fixed-rate loan with Capital One Healthcare for the borrower. The 77,805-square-foot property is fully leased to seven tenants: five biotech tenants, an indoor cycling studio and a restaurant, which is slated to open in early this summer.
COLLEGE STATION, TEXAS — Skanska USA has been awarded a $21 million contract with Texas A&M University to oversee the construction of the Agriculture & Life Science Building 4. The project broke ground on Nov. 13 and it will be completed in February 2017. The five-story, 80,000-square-foot building will house the university’s Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Sciences. The first three floors will include offices, conference rooms and dry work areas. The top two floors will include teaching and wet research laboratories. Kirskey Architecture is project architect.
SAN DIEGO — HFF has arranged a $96.4 million loan for Genesis at Campus Point, a vacant, four-building office complex in the UTC submarket of San Diego, which will fund the complex’s conversion into a biotech space. The 311,022-square-foot campus is located at 4224, 4242 and 4244 Campus Point Court and 10210 Campus Point Drive. The space is situated near the convergence of interstates 5 and 805 inside a life science cluster. Other notable tenants in the area include the University of California San Diego, Scripps medical campus, Illumina, Eli Lilly and Celgene. The buildings will feature multiple conference rooms, an on-site café with indoor and outdoor seating, a full-service fitness center, large balconies and a combination of covered and surface parking. HFF’s Tim Wright, Todd Sugimoto and Zack Holderman arranged the financing on behalf of the borrower, a partnership between Phase 3 Real Estate Partners and its institutional partner. The 36-month, floating-rate loan was placed with TPG Real Estate Finance Trust. Proceeds will be used to recapitalize the mid-year acquisition and fund the immediate repositioning costs of the asset.
WALTHAM, MASS. — Holliday Fenoglio Fowler (HFF) has secured $74.2 million in first mortgage financing for a lab/biotech facility located at 830 Winter St. in Waltham, a western suburb of Boston. HFF arranged the floating-rate loan with Wells Fargo while working on behalf of the borrower, a joint venture between King Street Properties and an affiliate of Carlyle Realty Partners VII. Completed in 2001, the 182,104-square-foot facility is fully leased to ImmunoGen, GlaxoSmithKline and Histogenics Corp. Greg LaBine of HFF represented the borrower in the financing transaction.
LOS ANGELES — Loyola Marymount University (LMU) in Los Angeles has debuted its new $110 million Life Sciences building. Construction on the 100,000-square-foot project began in June 2013. The new Life Sciences building houses faculty and research staff from the biology, chemistry and biochemistry, health and human sciences, civil engineering, and environmental science departments under the Seaver College of Science and Engineering. It provides modernized laboratories and collaborative research space. The three-story facility contains 35 teaching labs, 40 faculty and staff offices, nine informal student study spaces, a green roof and outdoor laboratory, three conference rooms and a 273-seat auditorium with an adjoining 1,800-square-foot terrace. C.W. Driver constructed the new building, which CO Architects designed.
ROCKVILLE, MD. — GI Partners has acquired a 290,000-square-foot life science facility in Rockville for $322.5 million. The facility is located at 9911 Belward Campus Drive, roughly 20 miles northwest of Washington, D.C. The property is situated along the Interstate 270 corridor that is commonly referred to as “DNA Alley”. The manufacturing facility is fully occupied by Human Genome Sciences Inc. (HGSI). The global healthcare company, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of GlaxoSmithKline, has leased the space through June 2026. “We are very pleased to own 9911 Belward, an institutional-quality property with state-of-the-art life science improvements,” says Mike Armstrong, GI’s vice president. “The facility’s location in one of the nation’s largest biotechnology clusters, coupled with its robust infrastructure, makes it an attractive property for life science and biotechnology use.” BioMed Realty (NYSE: BMR) acquired the facility in 2006 as part of a sale-leaseback transaction with HGSI. The company’s board of directors declared a special dividend of $0.30 per share of common stock, reflecting a return to stockholders of a portion — about $61 million — of the sale proceeds. BioMed plans to use the remaining proceeds to pay down the balance of the company’s unsecured revolving credit facility. BioMed …
SELDEN, N.Y. — Suffolk County Community College (SCCC) has opened a $29.8 million William J. Lindsay Life Sciences Building in Selden. Patchogue, N.Y.-based BBS Architects served as architect, interior designer, and civil, mechanical and electrical engineer for the building, which is aiming to achieve LEED Gold certification. Approximately 5,000 students will attend classes in the new building in the spring semester beginning in January 2015. Additionally, the building will also allow for the expansion of science classes to include an additional 100 students in the spring and 300 students next fall. The project team included J. Petrocelli Contracting, Tsoi/Kobus & Associates, Greenman-Pedersen, Ysrael A. Seinuk and Bladykas Engineering. New York State and Suffolk County financed the project in equal parts.
SALEM, N.H. — Foxx Life Sciences has leased space at 6 Delaware Drive Crossing, a 20,700-square-foot industrial/flex building in Salem. The company will occupy 18,302 square feet at the property, which will allow it to relocate and expand its headquarters and operations. Foxx Life Sciences previously occupied space at 8E Industrial Way Suite 1 in Salem. Chris Healy of CBRE/New England represented the tenant in the transaction.
SEATTLE — Kilroy Realty Corporation (KRC) has acquired a 140,605-square-foot life sciences facility in Seattle for $106 million. The four-story facility is located at 401 Terry Ave. North in the city’s South Lake Union neighborhood. It sits adjacent to KRC’s Westlake Terry campus. Notable tenants in the surrounding area include Amazon.com, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. The LEED-Gold property was developed in 2003. It was one of only five life science facilities developed in the Puget Sound region during the past 10 years. The building is fully leased to Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) through 2021. ISB is a foremost strategy developer for the fields of biology and medicine. KRC was represented by Peter Roth of Allen Matkins law firm. Joseph Delaney and Bryan Helfer of the Foster Pepper law firm represented the seller, Vulcan Realty Corp., in this transaction.
BOSTON — Senior Housing Properties Trust (NYSE: SNH) has acquired the two-building headquarters of Vertex Pharmaceuticals in Boston for approximately $1.1 billion. The pair of 15-story towers includes biomedical research facilities, corporate office space, structured parking and street-level retail space for a total of 1.65 million square feet. The property, leased to Vertex for the next 15 years, officially opened last month. Located in Boston’s Seaport District, the facilities will consolidate approximately 1,300 employees from 10 Vertex offices in Cambridge, Mass. “The acquisition of this state-of-the-art property, which is ideally located in Boston’s fastest growing downtown submarket and one of the nation’s top investment markets, represents a unique opportunity to further diversify SNH’s portfolio and increase our exposure to the medical office building segment,” says David Hegarty, president and COO of Newton, Mass.-based SNH. The trust predicts that the transaction will be immediately accretive to normalized funds from operations (FFO) per share by 6 to 8 cents per year. The deal is expected to close in the first half of this year. “Post-closing, SNH will remain solidly positioned with a strong balance sheet and committed to its disciplined strategy of acquiring high-quality, premier properties that create significant value for SNH …
