Medpace Plans $327M Campus Expansion

Medpace, a publicly traded clinical research company, is moving forward with a two-building 654,000-square-foot expansion of its corporate campus in Madisonville, Ohio.

According the Cincinnati Business Courier, the $327 million project recently secured several incentives from both the city and the Port of Greater Cincinnati Development Authority, after the parties reached an agreement to form a tax-increment financing district worth $3.4 million annually.

When groundbreaking begins, the expansion will be the largest office construction project in the city.

Agreements, incentives, improvements

Within the new agreement, the expansion’s developer RBM Development Co., which is owned by Medpace’s CEO, will be able to reinvest property taxes back into the project. Additionally, the city of Cincinnati will contribute $1.5 million to public improvements at the development site, as well as $200,000 to improve the infrastructure surrounding the intersections of Medpace Way and Hetzell Street, the campus’ surrounding streets. To that end, Medpace is contributing an additional $30,000, while the Ohio Department of Transportation is set to chip in $325,000.

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In June of last year, the project gained an additional $33 million in job-creation tax credits, as well as additional incentives from JobsOhio, the Cincinnati Business Courier reported. Upon the buildings’ completion, Medpace plans to bring 1,500 new jobs to the campus. Presently, Medpace has roughly 2,300 employees around its hometown, with a total of 5,600 also working out of Dallas, Denver and Mexico City.

Medpace’s Madisonville footprint

Skanska is overseeing the project’s development on behalf of RBM. The newly agreed-upon development will consist of a nine-story, 579,000-square-foot office tower to be built at the site of the Building 300 of the Medpace Corporate Campus, located at 5355 Medpace Way. According to CommercialEdge information, the current 57,340-square-foot facility, built in 2011, is home to the company’s Clinical Pharmacology Unit.

That property will be demolished, and the unit, devoted to testing early-stage clinical trials for a variety of drugs, will move operations to the second planned building, a two-story, 75,000-square-foot facility at 5401 Hetzel St. Additionally, the company plans to build two parking garages totaling 1,300 spaces. The new facility will include an outdoor plaza and walkways, which connect to the existing buildings at the campus.

The new base of operations for the company’s Clinical Pharmacology Unit is taking shape at a vacant lot that Medpace bought for $850,000 in 2020, the same source shows.

The expansion of Medpace’s Madisonville campus dates to 2022, when the Cincinnati Planning Commission approved the project’s initial proposal. The Planning Commission approved the most recent amendment to the project’s zoning back in October of last year.

Initially, the project called for a 485,000-square-foot first building, while The Clinical Pharmacology Unit’s new abode measured 85,630 square feet. At the time, the estimated costs added up to $265 million, the Cincinnati Business Courier reported.

According to CommercialEdge information, the existing campus includes five buildings totaling more than 575,000 square feet across 30 acres. Amenities at the campus include a fitness center, day care facility and dining hall.

The Medpace Corporate Campus lies adjacent to two hotels, and roughly a quarter mile northeast of The Christ Hospital’s Red Bank Outpatient Center. Access to the Red Bank Expressway, which merges with the Interstate 71, is equidistant in the opposite direction. Downtown Cincinnati is roughly 7 miles to the southwest.

Cincinnati’s slow start

A recent analysis from Newmark shows that outside of Medpace’s expansions, The Queen City has only 43,000 square feet of space in its pipeline, owed to a project in Northern Kentucky. When it breaks ground, Medpace’s expansion will expand the city’s pipeline nearly 15 times over.

On the medical office front, Remedy Medical Properties purchased a six-building, 145,308-square-foot portfolio of buildings around the city’s outskirts and Northern Kentucky submarket.