Alexandria Real Estate Equities just broke ground on a 307,000-square-foot, build-to-suit project for Biogen Idec. It is the first phase of what will eventually be the 1.73 million-square-foot Alexandria Center, a mix of office, lab, entertainment space and housing.
Since Tom Andrews joined the firm in 1999, the company has grown its footprint to more than two million square feet – in Cambridge alone. When he joined, Alexandria only owned a half dozen properties, but became a power player in the area’s lab and office market when it acquired the 1.1 million-square-foot Technology Square complex in 2006.
Tom Andrews
Title: Senior Vice President, Alexandria Real Estate Equities; Cambridge Office
Age: 51
Experience: 23 years
Has the real estate or business attitude in Kendall Square changed since your first acquisition here?
We’ve been here really actively and substantially since 2006 with our acquisition of [Technology Square], our big arrival in the Cambridge market and a development. In the last few years we’ve seen the continued influx of life science firms from outside the region and of those within the market, particularly Novartis, Genzyme and Biogen that is now going to reunite its company here in Kendall Square. Then you have large tech users like Microsoft and Google coming into the office market here to grow their operations. Then there are nonprofits like the Broad Institute that has continued its growth here. In addition to that, there’s been the new presence of housing on Third Street particularly, and in the last 18 months a real influx of restaurants and food service operations, which was the big complaint about Kendall Square. Now there have been about 16 new restaurant operations opened. It feels like there’s a real momentum for urban amenities. I think people really used to feel that Kendall Square was really just a suburban office park located in East Cambridge, and now it feels much more like a 24/7 neighborhood with strong amenities for the workforce. Recently, you’ve seen a return to Cambridge of the venture capital industry after they all migrated to the Route 128 market in the 1990s, and they’re all coming back en masse right now. There seems to be an increasing pace of evolution in the district.
You just opened a new restaurant, Catalyst, with conference space attached. How does Alexandria view its role in helping to make Kendall more of a destination for the masses, rather than just a place to go take a tour of MIT?
We focus on cluster development, and part of that is providing the environment for companies that want to cluster together. The need and desire for the collaboration between academic science and commercial science is very strong. When you have a setting where the best and brightest minds want to aggregate and meet together, that’s going to be a great place to invest as a real estate operator. To try to catalyze that type of space – restaurants, meeting spaces, places where industry meetings occur – all that is part of the ecosystem that companies want to be a part of. Whatever we can do to help foster that interaction we think helps support the idea of the cluster.
Does that translate at all into collaboration among the big property owners here, like you, Boston Properties, RREEF, etc.?
One example is that a number of the real estate companies participate at a board level in the Kendall Square Association, and that organization hosts events to invite people who work and live here to get together. That board seeks to influence city and state government in terms of how they view or treat the Kendall Square district to try to benefit the businesses that operate here. We all have projects that are seeking to attract and grow tenants here, so of course we’re competing for a finite number of tenants, and therefore not everything’s collaborative. But we all do better to the extent that the district does better.
Can you tell readers what kind of demand you’re seeing from prospective tenants that could be the catalyst for more construction at Alexandria Center?
We’re seeing demand, at least prospective demand, from the pharmaceutical industry outside the U.S., from inside the U.S. and already in this market that want to be in Kendall, or have an expansion need to expand to this location. There’s demand from the non-pharma biotech companies that are at clinical stage and expect to grow significantly once they have products on the market. Many of those already have space in Cambridge and want to stay here. Some are tech users in Cambridge already, some of which are on Route 128 that have asked about timing and the economics of a potential build-to-suit. Demand is coming from a variety of sources.
Tom Andrews’ Five Favorite Kendall Square Food/Night Spots:
House Roasted Coffee at Area Four
The Lobby Gallery at MIT’s Koch Center
Pool, Pinball, and Pints at Flattop Johnny’s
Chocolate Fondant at Catalyst
Authentic Portuguese Food at Atasca
