A joint venture between two life science and healthcare developers plans a 100,000-square-foot lab and office project on Pico and Sepulveda Boulevards.
L.A.-based developer Hatchspaces and Denver-based Nexcore Group announced plans for a five-story office complex with wet lab facilities.
The firms acquired the site, which is currently home to a strip mall, for $10.8 million in July, using a $8.86 million loan from Pacific Western Bank, records show.
The site is next to the Expo/Sepulveda light-rail station, which connects Downtown Los Angeles and Santa Monica along the Expo Line.
Construction is slated to start on the project in early 2022, Hatchspaces’ co-founder Allan Glass said.
The building will be the third development the firms have worked on together, with the other two in Irvine and Boulder, Colorado.
“The greater Los Angeles market has matured to the point where large blocks of technically specific space is an immediate need,” Allan said in a statement.
Though Southern California’s life science market is not as large as the segment has grown in the Bay Area, San Diego or Boston, a number of biotech firms have significant operations across the region, including Amgem and Allergan, among others. Several trade groups actively promote the life sciences industry and the development of space to accommodate its growth – with a recent emphasis on “wet labs” for active research – in Los Angeles.
The overall vacancy rate for life science space is around 1.5 percent, according to Cushman & Wakefield, with only 7.6 million square feet of lab space across the county.