Boston-Area Life Science Property Trades for $132M

One Patriots Park. Image courtesy of Newmark

Barings purchased a fully leased life science property in Bedford, Mass., from Jumbo Capital for $132 million. The 144,000-square-foot One Patriots Park is sited on 14.4 acres near the intersection of Interstate 95 and Route 128.

The property is located roughly 20 miles north of Boston’s central business district and 14 miles from Cambridge, the epicenter of the Greater Boston area laboratory market. Newmark’s Robert Griffin, Edward Maher, Matthew Pullen and Samantha Hallowell represented the seller in what was likely a highly competitive process given the state of the market.

“Boston’s status as one of the world’s foremost life science clusters is attracting a myriad of interested investors, fueling new development, record levels of tenant absorption, property sales and a previously unseen volume of capital flowing into local companies,” according to a first quarter 2022 report by Colliers.

Significant Improvements

One Patriots Park last changed hands 18 months ago in late December 2020, when Newmark arranged Longfellow Real Estate Partners and Bain Capital’s sale of the two-story building to Jumbo Capital and Iron Point Partners for $72.5 million. The property, then 66 percent leased, had undergone a complete renovation in 2019, transforming it from a former flex/R&D facility into a modern laboratory destination. Jumbo later upgraded the asset with infrastructure improvements.

Currently, One Patriots Park is 100 percent occupied by four life science companies—Homology Medicines Inc., N2 Biomedical, Frontera Therapeutics and Obsidian Therapeutics—which took the property to an even higher level of quality with on-site buildouts, including Biosafety Level 2 and 3 laboratories, Good Manufacturing Practice-compliant facilities and cleanroom space. Barings has additional plans for the asset; the company will pursue value enhancements via renovations of the remaining first-generation lab space.

Barings Looking for More

High-quality, well-leased life science properties located in STEM and innovation markets like Boston continue to maintain a high position on Baring’s acquisition radar, according to prepared remarks. In July 2021, the investor acquired a 275,700-square-foot office campus on the San Francisco Peninsula in Burlingame, Calif., with plans of transforming the property into Peninsula Innovation Point, a 536,000-square-foot life science and technology complex.