By Jon Chesto
When demand for office space cratered during the COVID-19 pandemic, many developersdoubled down on building lab space instead. Lately, it sure seems like they went overboard.
With newly builtlife sciences buildings hitting the market at a much faster rate than they can be filled, the availability of lab space in Greater Boston has skyrocketed, to the point where it rivals that of the pandemic-battered office market.
It’s a massive shift, in a short time.
Three years ago, in the depths of the pandemic, only around 1 percent of existing lab space in the region was vacant or available via sublease. Today, commercial real estate brokerage Colliers reported last week, that number is 21.5 percent, and vacancies are expected to grow in the coming months as more buildings open. For comparison, the availability ratefor office space in Greater Boston is 22.7 percent.
There are fundamental differences between the lab and office markets — notably that most lab work, unlike office work,needs to be done in person. But the sharp rise in lab vacancies is a stark reminder of how quickly fortunes can change for a hot industry, even a still thriving one like Boston’s biotechs.
This shift represents more of a problem within the real estate industry than in life sciences, because so many developers pursued lab projects at the same time. The amount of Greater Boston lab space occupied by tenants has climbed by more than one-fifth over the last two years. But because of so much new construction and office-to-lab conversions, the amount of empty lab space has climbed even faster, hitting an all-time high of 11 million square feet. And for lablandlords, the scene will likely get worse before it gets better.
“We haven’t seen vacancies peak yet,”said Colliers research director Jeffrey Myers. “Once they start to turn the corner, it could take years … to get back to something we would consider more of a normal market.”
Several factors are driving the sudden shift.
Back when lab space was impossible to find, pent-up demand prompted many developers to bet on life sciences projects“on spec,” or without commitments from tenants. At the time, many local biotechs often took whatever lease they could find, sometimes renting considerably more than they needed. Meanwhile, money poured into the region’s biotech scene from venture capitalists hoping for a big payout, through an initial public offering, or from a sale to a much larger drug company, fueling demand for real estate. As a result, lab projects sprouted all over the region.
Now, many of those shiny new buildings are hitting the market; the amount of lab space in the northwestern suburbs along Route 128, for example, essentially doubled in the past five years. The small firms that took on more space than they needed are now looking to sublease someof it.The IPO machine has slowed considerably, as has the flow of cash from VC firms. And several significant players, including Takeda and Ginkgo Bioworks, have announced layoffs in recent months.
“It’s a correction from the sugar high we had during COVID when everybody was piling money into anything that said ‘life sciences,’” said Bob Coughlin, an executive at real estate brokerage JLL’s Boston office who specializes in lab deals.
The slowdown is evident all over Greater Boston. Myers rattled off a few examples of unleased spaces topping 400,000 square feet in size, from the former John Hancock headquarters at 601 Congress St. in the Seaport that was renovated into labs but remains empty, to the former Tufts Health Plan headquarters in Watertown, also converted and empty. A similarly sized building just went up across from the Leader Bank Pavilion in the Seaport — also vacant. Lab plans have been shelved for a former auto dealership site in Needham and at the Riverside train terminal in Newton, while construction was evenhalted midstream on a lab building going up along McGrath Highway in Somerville.
Factor in the buildings under construction, and the availability rate for labs in Greater Bostonapproaches 32 percent, according to JLL.In total, nearly 5 million square feet of labs opened in just the first six months of 2024 across Greater Boston, per JLL’s research, with only one-fifth of that newly built space already leased.
Empty floors even abound in the industry epicenter of Kendall Square. There was less speculative building in Kendall; most new buildings there are preleased to big tenants such as AstraZeneca, the Broad Institute, and Takeda. But Colliers notes a record amount of lab space is on the market now in Cambridge: 3.6 million square feet, most of it in or near Kendall.
Beth O’Neill Maloney, head of the Kendall Square Association, doesn’t think the amount of empty space hurts Kendall; the district is as vibrant as it’s ever been, she said, and the vacancies could allow more startups to expand there.
“It’s the normal ebb and flow as we build and fill, I’m pretty confident about that,” Maloney said. “Zero percent vacancy rate probably isn’t the healthiest for us. … The availability of some sublease space actually helps some early-stage companies grow here, thrive, and take root.”
Advocates for the industry say the empty space underscores the need for the Legislature to pass an economic development bill that would allocate roughly $100 million a year for life sciences,including tax credits for biotechs that add jobs in the state,essentially reauthorizing two previous rounds of state assistance.
The House and Senate could not reach an agreement on the bill before regularly scheduled formal sessions ended for the year on Aug. 1. The Massachusetts Biotechnology Council sent a letter last week to legislative leaders, urging them to bring lawmakers back for a special formal session to pass the bill as soon as possible, as Governor Maura Healey has requested.
In a similar letter to Beacon Hill leadership in July, MassBio noted that the industry still added around 3,000 jobs in Massachusetts last year, “despite the perceived industry downturn.”
“My hope would be there’s a sense of urgency,” Ben Bradford, a vice president at MassBio, said of reauthorizing the state’s life sciences initiative.“This is a great tool for the state to recruit companies or to keep companies here.”
Still, the sharp surge in vacancies has provided welcome relief to all the smaller biotechs that had been jockeying for space. Coughlin, the JLL executiveand former head of MassBio, has been working through a planned vacation this week to keep up.
“I’m doing predominantly tenant work, and I’m as busy as I can be,” Coughlin said. “I don’t like being this busy in August, but I am.”