Alexandria Sells LIC Life Sciences Site For Loss To Film Studio
Alexandria Real Estate Equities has sold one of its two Long Island City properties, a site where it planned to develop life sciences labs, for 23% less than it paid.
The property, a 52K SF former printing hub at 47-50 30th St., sold for $19.1M last month, according to public records posted by the city this week. Alexandria purchased the site in 2019 for roughly $25M in the hopes of creating a life sciences cluster in the up-and-coming Queens neighborhood, Crain’s New York Business reported.
Alexandria still owns 30-02 48th Ave., a 179K SF former book bindery that it renovated into a life sciences hub after purchasing the property in 2018 for $75M. Tenants there include antibody drug developer RenBio and Envisagenics, a company using AI to learn about RNA, but the property is still roughly 70% vacant, per Crain’s.
In response to questions about the sale and the company's plans in Long Island City, Alexandria Executive Chairman Joel Marcus wrote in an email, "Recycling capital."
The buyer for the 47-50 30th St. site was a shell company, CM LIC Studios 30th Street II, registered to television and movie studio developers and operators Cine Magic.
Cine Magic, which applied for financial assistance from the New York City Industrial Development Agency for the acquisition, plans to upgrade and expand the building to function as growth and support space for its neighboring production studio at 30-15 48th Ave.
Queens has been drawing in film studio developments over the past few years, with Long Island City the most recent neighborhood to attract the industry.
In February, the Robert De Niro-backed Wildflower Studios, a 775K SF project that will house 11 soundstages, topped out in Astoria, with Kaufman Astoria Studios also in the northern Queens neighborhood. In the same month, Mayor Eric Adams joined developers at a groundbreaking in Sunnyside for a planned 340K SF production campus.
Meanwhile, Cine Magic's Long Island City neighbor is Silvercup Studios, which was once the largest production studio in the city at 10.4 acres and extends from Queens into the South Bronx.
The film and television production industry’s foray into Queens has now blunted the borough's potential life sciences growth. Developers and local leaders had hoped that Long Island City could become a hub for the industry because of its mix of transport accessibility, high levels of manufacturing-friendly zoning, lower costs and access to young talent.
“We think Queens has all the ingredients,” King Street Chief Investment Officer Rob Albro told Bisnow in March 2022. “We think Long Island City is going to be one of the major nodes, if not the major node.”
But the scarcity of mid-sized real estate has stymied the growth of NYC’s life sciences industry, leaving companies with few labs to step into as they finish their incubator phases.
“[Tenants] don't want to go from four benches at an incubator to 25K SF, they need to go first to maybe 5 or 10K SF,” Susan Rosenthal, New York City Economic Development Corp.’s senior vice president for life sciences and healthcare, said at a Bisnow event in July. “That's a really hard proposition for developers because they're still early stage for their risky tenants.”
Nor are things steady in Long Island City’s office market.
Vacancy in Class-A office space in the neighborhood was 43.1% at the end of 2022, according to Cushman & Wakefield. In February, Related and BentallGreenOak handed over the keys for the Paragon Building at 2100 49th Ave. and the Blanchard Building at 2109 Borden Ave. to their lender after buying the office complex in 2016 and spending $45M overhauling it.
