Somerville Lab Project Lands Nearly $200M Construction Loan
Somerville’s spate of life sciences projects will continue after a forthcoming lab development landed a $192.5M construction loan.
North River Leerink, a joint venture of developers North River Co. and Leerink Development, secured the debt to continue construction of 100 Chestnut St., a spec development located in the Brickbottom District, which broke ground late last year and is expected to deliver in 2023.
100 Chestnut will encompass 200K SF of Class-A lab and office space, as well as 8,500 SF of retail and amenity space and parking. Colliers Capital Markets team arranged the construction loan from an affiliate of Square Mile Capital Management.
Developers see this as another step toward turning Brickbottom, adjacent to a rail stop and less than half a mile from Kendall Square, into a more recognized life sciences hub, especially as rising rents push developers out from the city center. Other recent Somerville life sciences developments include BioMed Realty’s purchase of 162K SF in Assembly Square early last year, a 465K SF life sciences project by Greystar and USQ, a $2B residential-and-lab mixed-use project that broke ground in Union Square last summer.
100 Chestnut runs parallel to a nearly 8-acre site at 150 and 200 Inner Belt Road, which already contains a fully leased 191K SF lab building and another 3.4-acre development site. Formerly an industrial site, the neighborhood, as the name suggests, provided the clay-rich soil for many of the city’s older brick buildings.
Massachusetts is set to see an additional 20M SF of dedicated life sciences space come to market between now and 2024, per a recent MassBio report.
