Mass General Brigham has a long-term lease of 100,000 square feet of lab space on the lower floors at the 74M building in Somerville’s Assembly Square, said the developer and property manager Greystar on Thursday.
The building – named after its address at 74 Middlesex Ave. – will consolidate Mass General Brigham’s pathology laboratory services, taking up more than 20 percent of the 15-story building’s lab and office space. As part of the commitment, the health system has rights to expand and extend its occupancy in the building, Greystar said. It already owns a large administrative facility in Federal Realty’s Assembly Row neighborhood.
With the news, “we believe the building is well positioned to expand its tenant base,” said Matt DeNoble, senior director of investment Management at Greystar. The company is marketing the space to “groups looking to attract top talent to the broader Assembly Square innovation hub.”
The MGB expansion follows last month’s news that the TransMedics Group has begun a $56 million buildout on its building in Assembly Square. Its 498,000-square-foot lease from BioMed Realty, which will turn a new 12-story commercial research and development building into TransMedics’ global headquarters and manufacturing hub, was announced in January.
The MGB deal is another positive development for the local labs market, which has an estimated 14 million square feet of supply available, according to local experts.
It could also help developer Divco West move on a project at 120 Middlesex Ave. that it sees as the future gateway to a life science corridor positioning Assembly Square to compete for tenants with Cambridge’s Kendall Square. Divco West is eager to put up a 19-story lab building at Assembly Row, but heard concerns in August from Somerville’s Planning Board about adding unusable space to a market that’s been glutted since the Covid pandemic.
Labs development continues to struggle in Union Square, which is being remade in a 20-acre, $2 billion project controlled by master developer USQ. In the spring, Hamilton Co. proposed to change the zoning at 1 Union Square to residential from commercial. Hamilton bought the land 10 years ago and has been working on building labs there for five. “We would have liked to have done that project,” said Jameson Brown, the developer’s co-chief executive and chief operating officer. “The market changed.”
