Demand for lab space up in Greater Boston


Survey says vacancies in Greater Bostons lab space fell below 10 percent in the third quarter.

Survey says vacancies in Greater Boston’s lab space fell below 10 percent in the third quarter.
 
 








Thomas Grillo
Real Estate Editor- Boston Business Journal

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Greater Boston’s lab space has continued a streak of strong results, with market-wide vacancies dropping below 10 percent, according to a report from Richards Barry Joyce Partners.

The firm’s semi-annual bio space survey said the third quarter vacancy rate in Greater Boston’s lab market fell to 9.7 percent, down from 13.1 percent for the same period last year. Cambridge saw its lab vacancy rate fall to 11.9 percent from July through September from 16.2 percent in the third quarter of 2011. The vacancy rate in Boston’s labs slipped to 1.1 percent from nearly 3 percent last year and vacancies in the suburban labs dropped to 11.1 percent from 14.5 percent.

“With each passing quarter, we run out of superlatives to describe how the region’s laboratory real estate market has performed,” said Brendan Carroll, senior vice president of research, Richards Barry Joyce Partners, in a statement. “There is a downside to the positive growth, however, as there are notable space constraints in several high-demand submarkets and scant numbers of Class A choices available for users of many sizes.”

The Boston area is home to the largest privately-funded commercial construction pipeline in the U.S., the survey found. Eleven biotech-related construction projects are underway in Boston and Cambridge, representing 3.4 million square feet of laboratory including eight properties with 2.4 million square feet, 82 percent is pre-leased, the report said.

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