Recovery In Full Swing After Rollercoaster UK Industrial Sector ‘Overreaction’

If you want to raise money for a new real estate fund, get on a plane to Asia. For the first time on record, Asian investors were the largest source of capital for real estate funds globally in 2022. In a major shift in the…

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This series goes deep with some of the most compelling figures in commercial real estate: the deal-makers, the game-changers, the city-shapers and the larger-than-life personalities who keep CRE interesting.

James Sheppard is one of the big wheels of UK life sciences real estate. But, as he is the first to admit, he's not really a property person at all. A graduate in pharmacology and molecular genetics, Sheppard is guiding the UK growth of Kadans Science Partner, where he is managing director for the UK and Ireland.

Having worked on some of Europe’s largest and most advanced centres for life sciences innovation, such as The Francis Crick Institute and Imperial College’s White City Campus, his background is far removed from the usual property curriculum. 

Having started with pipettes, Sheppard is now working with the sometimes harder materials of bricks and mortar, yields and internal rates of return.

Fresh from the launch of Sycamore House, Kadans' latest 86K SF lab campus in the heart of the UK's Science Golden Triangle, and with recent announcements about a 22-storey lab tower at London's Canary Wharf and a £200M Manchester campus, Sheppard is bringing to life the property side of science. A 2.5M SF laboratory portfolio is under construction, with a further 500K SF of lab floorspace anticipated within the next three years.

Bisnow: You trained as a scientist, not a property professional, so what led you to commercial real estate? Sheppard: I'm not a real estate person by training. I've no property qualifications. I studied pharmacology and molecular genetics, and worked at the Francis Crick Institute, Read Full Story

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