MPN’s Nadia Bilynsky and Veronica Blum will handle the retail leasing.
Real estate company SkyREM plans to spend $250 million converting the historic Quartermaster site in South Philadelphia to a life sciences campus with restaurants and a hotel.
The redevelopment would feature wet and dry lab space for research, development and bio-manufacturing.
The renamed Quartermaster Science + Technology Park is near the southwest corner of Oregon Avenue and South 20th Street in the city’s Girard Estates neighborhood. It’s east of the Quartermaster Plaza retail center, which sold last year for $100 million.
The 24-acre campus is planned to have six acres of green space, an Aldi grocery store opening by March and already is the headquarters for Indego, the bicycle share program in Philadelphia.
Six buildings totaling 1 million square feet of space would be used for research and development labs. There’s 500,000 square feet of vacant space available for life sciences and high technology companies with availabilities as small as 1,000 square feet up to 250,000 square feet contiguous. There’s also 150,000 square feet of retail space available.
The office park has 200,000 square feet already occupied by tenants. The Philadelphia Job Corps Center and Delaware Valley Intelligence Center are tenants at the site.
The campus was previously used by the military as a place to produce clothing, footwear and personal equipment during World War I and II. The clothing factory closed in 1994. The Philadelphia Quartermaster Depot was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2010.
“We had a vision to preserve the legacy of this built-to-last historic Philadelphia landmark and transform it to create a vibrant space where the best and brightest want to innovate, collaborate, and work,” SkyREM CEO and Founder Alex Dembitzer said in a statement.
SkyREM, a real estate investor and developer, has corporate offices in New York and Philadelphia. The company acquired the site in 2001.
Vered Nohi, SkyREM’s regional executive director of new business development, called the redevelopment “transformational” for Philadelphia.
Quartermaster would join a wave of new life sciences projects being developed in the surrounding area and across the region.
The site is near both interstates 76 and 95 and is about 2 miles north of the Philadelphia Navy Yard, which has undergone a similar transformation from a military hub to a major life sciences and mixed-use redevelopment project. The Philadelphia Industrial Development Corp. is also in the process of selecting a developer to create a massive cell and gene therapy manufacturing complex across two sites totaling about 40 acres on Southwest Philadelphia’s Lower Schuylkill riverfront.
At 34th Street and Grays Ferry Avenue, the University of Pennsylvania is teaming with Longfellow Real Estate Partners on proposed a $365 million, 455,000-square-foot life sciences and biomanufacturing building at Pennovation Works.
SkyREM is working with Maryland real estate firm Scheer Partners to lease the science and technology space. Philadelphia’s MPN Realty will handle leasing of the retail space. Architecture firm Fifteen is working on the project’s design.
Scheer Partners Senior Vice President Tim Conrey said the Quartermaster conversion will help companies solve for “speed to market” as demand for life science space in the region has been strong.
Paul Schwedelson
