Northeastern College has acquired Burlington BioCenter, a 109,000-square-foot Class A life science workplace and laboratory property in Burlington, Mass., close to Boston. MetLife Actual Property Funding bought the asset for $33 million, a worth deeply discounted from the $103 million that the agency paid in November 2022. Newmark represented the vendor.
Northeastern has a Burlington campus that homes its George J. Kostas Analysis Institute for Homeland Safety. The brand new property will allow the college to broaden its homeland safety and world protection analysis capabilities, in response to media studies.
Burlington BioCenter is at 4 Burlington Woods Drive, a couple of mile from Northeastern’s campus and 17 miles from downtown Boston. MetLife acquired the property from a three way partnership between The Gutierrez Co. and GEM Realty Capital and financed the acquisition with a $54.4 million mortgage from Northwestern Mutual, in response to CommercialEdge.
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Gutierrez Co. started building in 2014 as an workplace constructing. It was transformed to lab and analysis house in 2019 with its inside laboratory buildouts finalized in 2022. The four-story facility options high-performance laboratory infrastructure, together with pH neutralization, high-efficiency HVAC programs, backup energy, devoted loading and a freight elevator.
The asset has versatile floorplates of roughly 28,960 sq. toes, with interconnecting staircases, a two-story foyer and floor-to-ceiling glass. It is among the solely totally built-out life science properties within the Burlington submarket.
Newmark’s Robert Griffin, Edward Maher, Matthew Pullen, James Tribble, Samantha Hallowell and William Sleeper led the staff that organized the deal on behalf of MetLife, whereas Grady Zink offered analytical assist. Griffin, Maher, Pullen and Hallowell had been additionally instrumental within the 2022 deal.
Life science market points
Whereas vacancies exceeded 20 p.c in main life science markets throughout the U.S. final 12 months, together with Boston, the long-term outlook stays robust. Nonetheless, there are headwinds going through the business, together with tariff threats and cuts to NIH funding which will curtail firm expansions.
In Larger Boston, the supply-demand imbalance has seen emptiness rising to 25 p.c, after being practically zero three years in the past, in response to a CBRE first-quarter report. In the meantime, availability rose to 36.2 p.c and emptiness elevated to 33.8 p.c within the metro’s suburban markets.
Suburban Boston recorded about 400,000 sq. toes of adverse absorption in Q1 because of each new sublease and direct house turning into obtainable, the report states. Asking rents remained flat, with a 60-basis-point lower to $78.27 per sq. foot.
