Life Sciences

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 …

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 …

RICHMOND — The Lingerfelt Cos. has started work on the third phase of BioTech 8, a six-story tower within downtown Richmond's 34-acre Virginia BioTechnology Research Park. The project will complete a $100 million, three-building headquarters complex for Health Diagnostics Laboratory Inc., (HDL) one of the country's fastest growing health management companies. The project totals 276,000 square feet, including a four-story, 485-space parking deck. According to Ryan Lingerfelt, a principal at Lingerfelt Cos., the third phase is scheduled for completion in spring 2014. “Since partnering with HDL in 2009, development has been fast paced,” says Lingerfelt. “HDL is a significant complement to our growing health care development portfolio.” The Phase III BioTech 8 expansion will bring the total development at biotech park to more than 1.2 million square feet. The park currently has a mix of more than 60 public and private bioscience companies, including three publicly traded firms. Lingerfelt recently completed several other local healthcare-related projects including OrthoVirginia, a $25 million, 70,000-square-foot facility in Chesterfield County for OrthoVirginia orthopedic specialists and HCA Virginia CJW Sports Medicine; the Virginia Community Healthcare Association headquarters, a two-story building; and the 100,000-square-foot Bon Secours Heart Institute. — Liz Burlingame