Blackstone-backed BioMed Realty has launched a move-in-ready lab and office space offering across its life sciences real estate portfolio.
The new business, branded Velocity Labs, offers flexible research and development workspace across core life sciences ecosystems in the US and UK to help biotech companies scale while cutting costs.
Colleen O’Connor, BioMed’s senior vice president for leasing for the US East Coast and UK markets, said: “With the science continuing to move quicker and quicker, the real estate has to keep up with it.
“We wanted to standardise what BioMed was going to be delivering in terms of quality and ability to move in quickly, so we launched and branded this as Velocity Labs.
“BioMed has been building lab suites out across a number of our key life sciences markets for almost a decade but the concept of branding it and pulling it all together and communicating to the market, is the differentiator.”
The average Velocity Lab suite in the UK is expected to measure between 5,000 sq ft and 6,000 sq ft, with an option to take more than one lab suite and move a dividing line to create a space of up to 12,000 sq ft.
The concept also moves away from a traditional 10-year lease, with tenants offered short-term leases averaging two years.
O’Connor added: “After we get the space back, we’re not going to spend another six months to customise that space for the next tenant. Theoretically, another company should be able to move in within 30 days.
“That’s why it’s really important for us that we build out space that’s generic and that we know is reusable.”
The move comes amid growing demand for fitted-out space across smaller life sciences companies and a prevalence of lab suites, developed on a speculative basis by various life sciences operators, entering the market. This includes Breakthrough Properties, a life sciences jv between Tishman Speyer and Bellco Capital, rolling out its StudioLabs concept at Trinity House in Oxford and Brookfield spin-out ARC launching Motherlabs in London.
O’Connor said: “Smaller tenants don’t want to design and build their own spaces for a number of reasons. The first one being that it’s obviously expensive and requires to have in-house experts focused on real estate.
“Also, there’s typically an immediate need for space but oftentimes build-outs can take anywhere from six to nine months all the way up to 15 months, depending on the programme.”
O’Connor also noted that “no two specs for lab suites are created equal” which is causing “confusion” among the life sciences occupiers hunting for the space.
She said: “After speaking with some of our tenants, gathering materials for speculatively developed lab suites across the key markets and lining them all up next to each other, we found that none of those deliveries were the same. So we wanted to make it crystal clear to the market exactly what we’re delivering.”
The concept is expected to be rolled out across BioMed’s lab buildings in Colorado, California, Washington and Massachusetts markets in the US as well as Cambridge in the UK.
The latter sees Velocity Labs being brought to the Babraham Research Campus, with B960 and the Glenn Berge building being the first to feature the model.
B960 is expected to be ready for occupation in February and has already been prelet to Insmed, a drug developer; Mosaic, an oncology therapeutics company; and Xap Therapeutics, a biotech firm.
The Glenn Berge building was delivered in 2020 and is occupied by PetMedix, which works in antibody innovation in animal health; BioCrucible, a molecular diagnostics company; and Mission Therapeutics, a drug discovery firm.
Babraham Research Campus also serves as a home to more than 60 bioscience organisations, including Cancer Research UK, One Nucleus and the Babraham Institute.
O’Connor said: “We think that, in the UK market, Babraham is the best spot for the scale-up space because the campus fosters companies when they’re just starting out. Then those companies need to grow into a scale-up space and our sites at Babraham are perfectly suited for that.”
Image from BioMed
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