Pico and Sepulveda development proposed
By Dolors Quintana
A 100,000 square foot biotech lab space with offices is planned for Pico Boulevard in West Los Angeles.
Life Science developer HATCHspaces and health care systems developer NexCore Group have joined forces on a proposed development at Pico and Sepulveda as reported by Urbanize Los Angeles. The project would be the redevelopment of a strip mall located near the Expo Line’s Pico and Sepulveda station.
This would be their third collaboration on such a building project and the building would be five stories tall with 100,000 square feet of office space that would be wet lab capable, which is in short supply in Los Angeles. Most of the burgeoning office space market in Los Angeles is being snatched up by entertainment and technology firms, but this development is aimed squarely at an entirely different market.
“The greater Los Angeles market has matured to the point where large blocks of technically specific space is an immediate need,” HATCHspaces co-founder Allan Glass in a statement “Most of our wet lab portfolio is at full capacity, and there are several large block tenants actively in the market. We’ve had multiple major pharmaceutical and biotech companies reach out to us hoping to expand into LA from top clusters like San Francisco, San Diego, and Boston in order to tap into the deep and diverse pool of experienced talent already in the region.”
HATCHspaces records show that the vacancy rate for life science and biotech companies in the Los Angeles area is 1.5%. There have been recent attempts to welcome this industry in the area of Culver City at BioScience LA and in the Harbor Cities at Biotech Park, but HATCHspaces and NexCore Group see another opportunity to increase the space near the Expo Line especially since the City has encouraged mixed industry and residential use of land along the Expo corridor as reported by Urbanize Los Angeles and cited by HATCHspaces and NexCore as their motivation.
