WS Development Opens Lab Building in Boston’s Seaport
Foundation Medicine, the largest life science organization to move to the city since 2011, anchors the property.
400 Summer St., a 630,000-square-foot life science development in Boston’s Seaport district, has celebrated its formal opening as the new headquarters of Foundation Medicine, a cancer-testing tech specialist previously based in Cambridge, Mass. The building is the most recent development in the 33-acre Seaport, a multi-building project undertaken by WS Development.
Foundation, which is a subsidiary of multinational pharmaceutical company Roche, is consolidating its 1,100 Massachusetts employees into the new 16-story building, from four separate locations. The deal it inked in 2019 marked the largest life science lease in Boston in more than a decade, since Vertex took 1.1 million square feet at Fan Pier in 2011.
The slowing demand for such space in Greater Boston was reportedly a factor in WS Development delaying development of a 420,000-square-foot building next door to 400 Summer that wasn’t preleased. The company’s business model is not only to build the properties, but also to own and lease them after completion, in contrast to a merchant developer’s model.
The goal of Seaport is the redevelopment of 33 acres on the waterfront to a mix of residential and commercial uses, along with civic, cultural and green spaces.
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Most of the space at 400 Summer St., about 600,000 square feet, will be office space and labs, but a 30,000-square-foot component will be neighborhood retail. The building is across the street from the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center.
The building has been certified LEED platinum, the highest level, and is the third building in the Seaport district to earn the certification. The 400 Summer St. development also included the creation of a pedestrian and bicycle corridor next to the building, which forms a connector between Summer Street and Congress Street, called the Summer Street Steps. Suffolk Construction built the structure, with Morris Adjmi Architects as the designer.
As lab space hub, Boston’s activity has slowed
Lab space users in Greater Boston remain cautious about making any kind of move, which has resulted in negative absorption for some submarkets for the property type, including the city itself, which saw 69,000 square feet of negative absorption during the first quarter of 2024, according to CBRE. Cambridge suffered 349,000 square feet of negative absorption during the same quarter, but these totals were partly balanced by suburban submarkets that attracted new tenants.
The vacancy rate for lab space in Greater Boston came in at 13.7 percent in the first quarter of 2024, a rise from less than 4 percent a year earlier, and nearly zero two years ago.
The first quarter of 2024 saw over 2 million square feet of new product deliver, but 65 percent of those completions were conversions, CBRE found. Of the 717,000 square feet of ground-up projects that delivered in the first quarter, 65 percent of the space was already preleased. That includes space that Eli Lilly is taking at 15 Necco Street, also on the Boston waterfront, to operate the Lilly Institute for Genetic Medicine, which will use promising RNA- and DNA-based tech to develop therapies.
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