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Image courtesy of Sasaki
Construction of the $530 million 10 World Trade project in Boston’s Seaport District is set to begin this year after two new investors joined the development team.
PGIM Real Estate and Wheelock Street Capital are partnering with Boston Global Investors on the 17-story, 530,000-square-foot office-lab tower at 401 Congress St.
In 2019, Massport selected BGI’s team to build an office tower on the 1.6-acre site next to the MBTA’s World Trade Center station. The plans were revised last year to add a large lab component.
PGIM and Wheelock join the existing project investors BGI, EDGE, Bastion Companies and Cogsville Capital Group. The project team is continuing to raise another $15 million from individual minority and women investors.
The project moves ahead as demand for life science space shows no let-up in the growing Seaport District submarket, which currently totals 4.4 million square feet. Asking rents for lab space in the Seaport hit $103 per square foot in the third quarter, a 23.4 percent increase over the last 12 months, according to CBRE’s Q3 Life Science report.
Newly-constructed lab buildings are fetching the highest rents among commercial properties in Greater Boston, according to CBRE. Nearly half of the 2.7 million square feet of lab construction and conversions in the Seaport District is already pre-leased.
