Friday, March 2, 2007

Boston Business Journal - by Michelle Hillman Journal Staff

There's no better audience for the Massachusetts Alliance for Economic Development than the Biotechnology Industry Organization's international convention.

The 2007 BIO International Convention is expected to draw 20,000 attendees to the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center in May -- many from biopharmaceutical companies large and small in search of places to build manufacturing and research facilities.

MAED, along with the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council , wants to take any mystery (and maybe the need for a real estate broker) out of the process.

Susan Houston, executive director of the alliance, said her organization wants to aggregate and showcase development parcels to attendees of BIO 2007. Houston 's group and the Biotech Council issued a call for existing buildings and parcels of land that are biopharmaceutical-ready sites. The submissions, due earlier this week, will be vetted by a committee of experts, said Houston.

The sites that meet the criteria set out by the alliance and biotech council will be added to an online directory aimed at taking some of the guesswork out of site selection in Massachusetts. The Web site can be found at www.massachusettssitefinder.com. Houston said the list will be unveiled and marketed by the Massachusetts Business Resource Team at the BIO 2007 convention.

Aside from very large and well-publicized development sites -- such as the Devens property owned by MassDevelopment where Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. (NYSE: BMY) is building a 1.5 million-square-foot manufacturing facility -- there are smaller tracts of land and existing buildings in towns with less sophisticated marketing machines with equal interest in harnessing tax revenue that new business brings. It's a highly competitive and extremely secretive process where neither the landlord nor tenant knows exactly what's on the table and no one dares show their cards. Most of the time, no one knows (or else they claim not to know) the true identity of the tenants being shown around.

Houston said there's a tremendous amount of interest from companies that want to follow in the footsteps of Novartis AG, Bristol-Myers, DSM/Crucell and Merck Research Laboratories, which have all opened research facilities in Boston or Cambridge.

"I think that MAED's attempt to list all the sites in the state does make it centralized, otherwise you're relying on a specific broker," said Meg Delorier, chief of staff for MassDevelopment. Delorier said there are instances where a site may be available but not publicized by specific towns because, for example, permits are not in place, the site is contaminated or it's not ready for sale.

Taurus builds novel R&D park in Argentina

Taurus Investment Holdings LLC is building the first technology park of its kind in Argentina . The R&D park is being constructed on 67 acres on a speculative basis in a joint venture with the University of Austral . The private university is leasing 67 acres of land to a subsidiary of Taurus Investments called Taurus Americas, where it will build four buildings -- each 30,000 square feet -- as part of the first phase of development.

It is the first foray into Argentina for Boston-based Taurus, though the company has been working on the joint venture for three years, said CEO Peter Merrigan, who described Argentina as an emerging, though volatile, market.

The Austral Technology Park will be constructed based on a U.S. model, said Merrigan, citing the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's University Park in East Cambridge as an example. MIT retained ownership of the land underneath the office, lab buildings and residential project and allowed the developer, Forest City Enterprises, to construct and own the buildings. Austral Park will cost more than $100 million to build.

Taurus is committed to Argentina, where it opened a five-person office dedicated to the Austral Technology Park project.

"You have to have an on-the-ground presence," said Merrigan. "You have to invest time and energy. A project like this just doesn't come together by itself. It's taken us years."

Taurus Investment has 17 operating companies around the globe in different emerging markets, including Argentina and Turkey. Merrigan said Taurus launched a private real estate investment trust in Istanbul where it has more than $250 million in projects in the works. Taurus Investments owns more than 10 million square feet of real estate worldwide.

Michelle Hillman is the real estate reporter for the Boston Business Journal. She can be reached at mhillman@bizjournals.com.

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