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December 25, 2022
Biotechnology Boom in the Boulder Valley
The COVID-19 pandemic — and its seemingly never-ending aftermath — has been a nightmare for commercial landlords of many different stripes, particularly those with significant holdings in retail and traditional office properties.
But in the Boulder Valley and Northern Colorado — especially along the U.S. Highway 36 corridor connecting Denver, Broomfield and Boulder — life-sciences and biotechnology companies with a thus-far unquenchable thirst for flex-industrial square footage have kept brokers and builders busy. And with 2023 upon us, there’s no sign of a slowdown on the horizon.
While office users who have largely remained in work-from-home or hybrid mode, leaving their workplaces underused, life-sciences companies are champing at the bit for additional space in the Boulder Valley, a market that’s rapidly becoming one of the industry’s leading regions.
“It’s been a very active second half of 2022,” BioMed Realty LLC president of West Coast markets Jon Bergschneider told BizWest in an interview this month.
In the Boulder Valley region, “you’ve got a great convergence of public and private industry, academic [institutions] like the University [of Colorado], venture capital” that combine to spur the growth of the local life-sciences industry, along with the real estate development necessary to support that growth, Bergschneider said. “It’s a multi-piston engine.”
All told, that biotech-related development accounts for “approximately 2.5 million to 3 million square feet of construction … underway or in the pipeline along the Boulder/Denver corridor,” according to a recent report from Boulder-based commercial real estate brokerage Dean Callan & Co. When you add proposed projects that have not been fully permitted, that square footage total is much higher.
“While office leasing has slowed dramatically, life science development is full steam ahead,” the report said. New development activity “will be a big boost to attracting more companies to our market and create even more demand for the [research and development] product Boulder provides.”
The biotech explosion in and around Boulder over the last half-decade or so comes as little surprise to local players who have long understood the region to be a technology powerhouse that punches well above its weight.
December 25, 2022