Its $145 million expansion project at The Landmark at Eastview delivered on time and on budget this year, BioMed Realty Trust Inc. is talking with four prospective tenants for its vacant laboratory and office shell building there.
The three-story building at 755 Old Saw Mill River Road, with nearly 131,000 square feet of space for rent, was one of three lab and office buildings completed this year on the life sciences campus in the towns of Greenburgh and Mount Pleasant. Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc., BioMed Realty”™s fourth largest tenant nationwide leasing 390,000 square feet, recently completed relocating much of its operations on the eight-building campus to the other two new facilities, which total 229,000 square feet. Regeneron officials will host a ribbon-cutting ceremony Oct. 6 at the Landmark.
BioMed, a real estate and development company with headquarters in San Diego, Calif., is in active discussions with two biotech companies in Westchester, a U.S. company outside New York and a foreign company considering a move to the Landmark, said Matthew G. McDevitt, executive vice president for acquisitions and leasing at BioMed. “We”™ve had a very strong activity level on the project,” he said. “We”™ve been really quite pleased with the level of activity that we”™ve had there.”
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Profectus BioSciences Inc., a Baltimore, Md.-based developer of vaccines for human immunodeficiency virus, hepatitis C and other chronic viral diseases, had occupied space in the new shell building this year, but moved to larger space on the Landmark campus, McDevitt said.
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He said the landlord is marketing the building by floor, each of which offers 40,000 to 45,000 square feet of space. “We think that”™s probably the highest and best use of that space for that building,” he said.
BioMed Realty last month celebrated the fifth anniversary of the company”™s initial public offering. Speaking at the New York Stock Exchange, Alan D. Gold, the company”™s co-founder, chairman and CEO, said the 125-employee company in 2004 owned interests in five properties totaling less than 400,000 square feet and generating less than $12 million in annualized base rents. Five years later, the company has assembled an industry-leading portfolio that includes 69 properties representing 10.5 million square feet and about $280 million in annualized base rents, Gold said. McDevitt said Regeneron Pharmaceuticals accounts for more than 5 percent of the company”™s annual base rent.
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McDevitt said the company has stayed with its seven life sciences core markets ”“ Boston, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, Maryland, Pennsylvania and New York ”“ because of “demand generators that are there,” especially in the form of National Institutes of Health funding to academic and medical institutions, “and the intellectual capital that companies are able to pull from” in those markets.
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Another well-capitalized biotech company, Long Island-based OSI Pharmaceuticals Inc., in July said it will consolidate its operations with a $95-million investment in the Ardsley Park Science and Technology Center in Greenburgh. The 350-employee company expects to grow to at least 600 jobs by 2012.
OSI spokeswoman Kathy Galante said the company has begun reconstruction work at the nearly 50-year-old Ardsley campus and expects to begin moving in employees by the end of this year.
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McDevitt said Westchester County rates highly among BioMed”™s core markets. “As we look around, we still think that Westchester is just a tremendous cluster of very impressive biotech companies, life science companies,” he said.
