SAN DIEGO – Colliers, a commercial real estate brokerage, is making a drive to capture more of the commercial real estate market for life science.
The firm is expanding its team of brokers who specialize in life science and office leasing, raiding its rival brokerage Newmark.
“We had quite a significant gap down here in San Diego,” said Aaron West, managing director of Colliers in San Diego and Las Vegas.
Colliers recruited Chris High, Steve Bruce, and Connor Evans from Newmark.
High and Bruce will serve as vice chairmen and co-leads of Colliers’ Southwest Life Science Practice and Evans will serve as vice president.
West said that the addition of High, Bruce and Evans “kind of solidifies us as taking over quite a share on the life science and office side.”
“It’s really just putting us back on the map with a high-profile team, which we can build upon and around,” said High, who has worked on leasing such projects as the Biovista Life Science Campus developed by Longfellow Real Estate Partners in Sorrento Mesa.
Before joining Colliers, Bruce, Evans and High were managing directors at Newmark.
Until they joined Colliers, West said that of 45 brokers in the San Diego office of Colliers, four or five have been focusing on life science, West said.
Life Science Market Picking Up
The move comes as the life science market is picking up after going through a post-COVID downturn in 2023 and “highlights our commitment to growth and expansion with professions that are deeply aligned with our culture,” said David Josker, president of U.S. West Region Brokerage for Colliers.
According to preliminary figures from CBRE, for the first quarter of 2024, life science real estate had a vacancy rate of 13.9% with downtown having one of the highest vacancy rates 50.9% while Torrey Pines – a historical hot spot for life science real estate – has a vacancy rate of 11%.
West said that the San Diego life science market post COVID is “a challenging market.”
“There are spots of brightness. There’s almost a billion dollars of funding year to date already,” West said. “We’re seeing tenant activity, albeit less than in previous years.”
While other life science markets, like San Francisco and Boston, have had a significant slump in life science activity, “San Diego is a little more protected than Boston and San Francisco because a lot of the growth we have is more organic,” West said. “We’re not a major corporate headquarters market, so a lot of the groups that we see and have seen succeed here in San Diego are from here. You’ll see serial CEOs who have worked with various companies or grown them up and sold them and do it all over again. They’re not going anywhere.”
West said that he expects San Diego’s life science market to remain about the same through the rest of 2024, picking up in 2025.
“There’s a handful of decent sized transactions out there that will be closing closer to the third-quarter time frame,” West said. “There’s a number of larger tenants in the market, but we’re seeing earlier-stage companies come out and lease and grow. That’s what we need as a market overall.”
Colliers
FOUNDED: 1898
HEADQUARTERS: Toronto
CEO: Jay Hennick
BUSINESS: commercial real estate brokerage
EMPLOYEES: 19,000
WEBSITE: www.colliers.com
CONTACT: 858-455-1515
NOTABLE: Colliers operates in 66 countries with more than $98 billion in assets under its management
