By Jon Peterson
BioMed Realty Trust has been able to secure two leases with existing tenants in its BioMed Realty Research Center lab office property located at 530 Fairview Avenue in the South Lake Union neighborhood of Seattle.
One of the tenants is Novo Nordisk. This company has signed a lease for an additional 25,000 square feet. It had already occupied 50,000 square feet in the property. Nanostring Technologies was in the property for 36,000 square feet. It will now be occupying an additional 20,500 square feet in the property in the future.
“I think that this leasing activity shows the demand that exists for space in the South Lake Union submarket. We are very pleased with these leases. It should mean that most of the space in our expansion will be leased prior to completion,” says Mike Rule, senior director of leasing for BioMed. He works out of the company’s regional office in Seattle.
The BioMed Realty Research Center now totals 101,118 square feet. The property is being expanded by an additional 120,000 square feet. The expansion should be completed sometime during the first or second quarter of next year.
BioMed Realty is very focused right now in the Seattle market in the South Lake Union submarket for most of its growth. “While being focused on this region will not allow us to grow in a big way, this is the sub-market where many of our tenants want to be located in. Our interest could be through the purchase of existing assets or through the construction of new buildings. I would think that a typically sized project for us on a square footage basis would be somewhere in the range of 100,000 to 200,000 square feet,” said Rule.
The portfolio of assets that BioMed Realty owns in the greater Seattle market now totals around 500,000 square feet in six different properties. Most of this is located in the South Lake Union submarket. The company does own around 110,000 square feet in the Bothell area. “We think that the Bothell market is one where manufacturing and technology firms are looking for space and not necessarily the biotech and life sciences firms that we are working within South Lake Union,” said Rule.
