Warren Avenue Investors, a Berwyn company established four years ago by a former BioMed Realty Trust Inc. executive, has formed a nearly $400 million joint venture with Ares Management Corp. to pursue buying life sciences real estate in emerging markets across the country.
The partnership completed a $165 million recapitalization of five properties it owns— three of which are in Malvern — and raised another $200 million to make acquisitions of lab and R&D properties in secondary markets such as Philadelphia, Houston, Maryland and elsewhere. Los Angeles-based Ares (NYSE: ARES) has $262 billion assets under management.
“There’s not a lot of pure players in this space and there’s so much capital chasing it,” said Matthew McDevitt, who helped build Biomed Realty, which was sold to Blackstone Group in 2016 for $8 billion. “When we sold to Blackstone, I retired for maybe an hour and decided to do this by myself.”
McDevitt established Warren Avenue in 2017 and named it after the street of his high school alma mater, Malvern Prep. It is focused solely on buying life sciences buildings in what he described a “core shoulder markets.”
“That’s where Warren Avenue is going to play best,” he said.
McDevitt’s ambition is to build up a portfolio and company that would eventually be on the same scale as BioMed Realty. “I’m ready to do it again,” he said.
When Blackstone acquired BioMed Realty five years ago, the company had amassed a portfolio of life sciences real estate totaling 18.9 million square feet in primary life sciences markets of Cambridge, Massachusetts; San Diego and San Francisco. A year ago, Blackstone sold BioMed Realty for $14.6 billion to a group led by existing BioMed investors and its portfolio at the time totaled 11.3 million square feet.
*Article courtesy of Philadelphia Business Journal
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