Image courtesy of CBT Architects
A major lab developer has sold a 1.55-acre retail property near Boston Landing, taking a $10 million loss in the process.
Life science REIT IQHQ sold 103 North Beacon St. to NB Development for $17 million. The firm bought the property for $27 million in 2021, according to public records.
The building backs onto a pair of large-scale developments around the Boston Landing station: New England Development’s Allston Yards project and NB Developments’ Boston Landing. The latter is also home to the headquarters of shoe giant New Balance, parent company to NB Development.
IQHQ secured BPDA board approval for a 265,000-square-foot office-lab building in January.
The company also secured city approval in 2023 for a larger, 409,000-square-foot lab campus on the site of the Sound Museum recording studio at 155 North Beacon St. That project was contingent on IQHQ buying and donating replacement space for the studio. The BPDA board approved the donation in October.
However, it’s not clear whether NB Development intends to move forward with those plans or propose something entirely different.
Neither IQHQ nor NB Development could be reached for comment about the deal or NB Development’s plans.
But the neighborhood’s lab market is currently swamped by new construction.
According to research by commercial brokerage Hunneman, the Allston-Brighton submarket has 1.32 million square feet of lab space under construction on top of its 564,000 square feet of existing buildings. Most of that space under construction was built without tenants lined up, and the metro-wide vacancy rate sat at 31.58 percent as of the third quarter, according to brokerage Newmark.
The changing lab real estate market is causing some developers to pivot away from labs and back towards housing. Others are choosing to delay breaking ground on their projects’ lab components.
Just across the Mass. Turnpike from Boston Landing, Berkeley Investments recently petitioned the Boston Planning Department to let it build 314 apartments first at its 176 Lincoln St. development, and hold off on building the 548,000 square feet of office, lab and R&D space that was originally supposed to rise first.
