Practice

A tenant representation practice built for life science decisions.

Site selection, relocations, expansions, renewals, and work-letter strategy for San Diego life science companies. We work early, model with the full operating picture in view, and stay close to the science, the milestones, and the operating realities that shape every decision.

Who we work with

We represent life science companies at every stage of their real estate life cycle. Most engagements fall into one of four situations. The earliest of these have the least urgency, and consistently the most upside.

Pre-Series A founders thinking about their first dedicated lab

The first lab is one of the most consequential decisions a founder makes in the company's first three years. It anchors hiring geography, sets the cost basis for years of operations, and locks in (or removes) the flexibility a young company needs as the science evolves. Founders rarely have time to develop their own market view at this stage, and the right structure is rarely obvious. We help founders evaluate incubator and shared-lab options against dedicated space, build-to-suit against existing inventory, and short-term flexibility against long-term economics. Often, the most valuable first conversation happens before the company is even sure it needs its own space.

Companies eighteen to twenty-four months from lease expiration

This is the moment of maximum leverage. Eighteen to twenty-four months is enough runway to run a real competitive process, build credible alternatives, and let market dynamics work in the tenant's favor. With less time, the renewal becomes reactive, and most of the leverage shifts to the existing landlord. We start the strategic work early, build the alternatives in parallel with any renewal conversation, and treat the existing landlord as one option among several until the economics say otherwise.

Milestone-driven expansion or contraction planning

Funding rounds, IND submissions, clinical readouts, and commercialization milestones all reshape space requirements, sometimes on short notice. The right real estate strategy anticipates both upside and downside scenarios well before they materialize. We work with companies to build flexibility into the lease itself: expansion options, contraction rights, sublease provisions, and modular build-outs that scale with the science. The cleanest expansion deals are the ones that were structured into the original lease.

Mergers, acquisitions, and footprint consolidation

After an acquisition, merger, or restructuring, real estate is rarely the first priority and almost always one of the most expensive things to get wrong. Overlapping leases, redundant build-outs, and stranded TI obligations can quietly cost millions if the integration is not handled deliberately. We work with corporate development teams, CFOs, and operations leaders to assess the combined footprint, restructure landlord relationships, and dispose of redundant space without disrupting the underlying business. The work is part real estate, part finance, part operations.

The work

What the work looks like

Every engagement is different, but most include some combination of the following workstreams. The depth and sequencing of each depends on the situation, the company stage, and the timeline.

Site selection and market intelligence

Most lab market data is lagging, generic, or filtered through a single source. Real-time intelligence comes from being in the market every day: direct conversations with landlords about availability and concessions, deal comps drawn from active negotiations, sublet inventory tracked the moment it surfaces, and submarket-level analysis of cluster dynamics across Sorrento Valley, Sorrento Mesa, Torrey Pines, UTC, Miramar, Carlsbad, Poway, and Rancho Bernardo. The result is a market view that often surfaces options a tenant would not see through public listings alone.

Lease structuring and economics

Comparing lease proposals on a like-for-like basis is harder than it looks. Base rent, operating expenses, free rent treatment, TI allowance, security deposit structure, escalations, and term length all interact in ways that can mask the actual cost difference between competing options. We model the full economics, including stress-tests for escalation, holdover, and termination scenarios, so the real cost of each path is visible before any decision is made. The goal is not to chase the lowest base rent. The goal is to understand the true effective rent and the true risk profile of each option.

Work-letter and TI strategy

Work letters are where most lab deals are won or lost. The scope of landlord-delivered work, the size and structure of the TI allowance, the mechanics of how unused TI converts to free rent or amortizes back into rent, the warranties on landlord work, and the punch-list and acceptance procedures all carry real economic weight. For lab build-outs specifically, the work letter has to map cleanly to what the science actually requires, which means coordinating with project managers, lab planners, and architects from the proposal stage forward. A well-structured work letter prevents the cost overruns and timeline delays that break otherwise good deals.

Negotiation strategy and execution

Every negotiation rests on a clear theory of where the landlord has room to move and where they do not. That theory comes from being in the market every day, knowing the comps before they are public, and understanding which landlords value certainty over economics, which value occupancy over rent, and which are positioning a building for sale. We bring that situational awareness to every term sheet conversation, which produces deals that close cleanly and lease documents that hold up under scrutiny.

Lab infrastructure and building diligence

Not every lab building can support every kind of science. HVAC capacity and air changes per hour, lab gas distribution, drainage and acid waste systems, electrical loading, emergency power, roof penetration capacity, vibration tolerance, ceiling height, and column spacing all shape what a building can practically deliver. We help tenants assess these factors early in the search, ideally before a building is even shortlisted, so that build-out budgets are built on real engineering constraints rather than optimistic assumptions. The buildings that look identical on a tour can have radically different cost profiles once the real work starts.

Lab strategy

Three lab-specific decisions that shape every engagement

These three questions recur across nearly every engagement and are addressed as part of the representation work, not as a separate advisory layer.

Generic lab vs. purpose-built tradeoffs

A generic lab gets a tenant operating faster and cheaper but constrains future workflow changes. A purpose-built lab is the opposite. The right answer depends on the company's stage, scientific roadmap, and capital plan. We make the tradeoff explicit, model it across a range of likely scenarios, and surface the points at which the answer flips.

Speed-to-occupancy planning

For a growth-stage company, every month of delay between signature and operation is a month of lost runway and lost research. Speed-to-occupancy is a real economic variable, not a feel-good objective. We plan it as one, with a sequenced critical-path between LOI, lease, permit, construction, and commissioning. We also identify which candidate buildings shorten the path materially, and which lengthen it for reasons that are easy to miss in a tour.

Time to occupancy is a number. We treat it like one.

Concession strategy in the current market

Concessions in San Diego lab in 2026 are real, available, and very specific to the building and to the tenant credit. Free rent, TI, base-rent abatement, expansion options, and termination rights all behave differently right now. The right concession package is rarely the largest one. We argue for the package that actually fits the company's plan, not the package that looks biggest in a comparison sheet.

The engagement model

How we work.

The practice has a defined engagement model. We tell clients what it is at the start. It does not change because a deal is moving fast.

Early advisory engagement

We prefer to begin 24 to 36 months before a lease event. The planning phase, before any search is underway, is when the decisions that determine the outcome are actually made.

Requirements analysis before any search

Before any building is toured, we write down the requirement, the constraints, and the financial parameters the company is working within. The search follows from that document.

Financial modeling on every option

Each shortlisted option carries a full financial model, with TI, escalations, op-ex, and concessions priced in. The model is the document. The recommendation follows from it.

Strict instruction fidelity in documents

What the client said in the meeting goes into the LOI. What goes into the LOI goes into the lease. We do not soften client positions to keep a deal moving, and we do not free-style language without confirmation.

No boilerplate

Every memo, scorecard, and model is written for the engagement in front of us. We do not template our way through other people's lab decisions.

Coverage

Where we work

We focus on the San Diego life science market. That includes every cluster where lab and lab-adjacent product is concentrated. If a requirement falls outside San Diego, we coordinate with Voit's broader Southern California platform and with partner brokerages elsewhere to deliver consistent representation in any market.

Where the work happens

Sorrento Valley

The historic core of San Diego biotech. Heaviest concentration of fitted lab; broadest set of comparables.

Sorrento Mesa

Adjacent inventory, increasingly converted from flex and office to lab. Pricing watchpoint for the cluster.

Torrey Pines

Mature, premium-priced. Dense academic and institutional adjacency. Limited speculative supply.

UTC

Mixed-use cluster with a growing lab footprint. Strongest amenity base for talent-sensitive tenants.

Miramar

Bigger floorplates, value-relative pricing, viable for manufacturing-leaning workflows.

Carlsbad · Poway · Rancho Bernardo

Adjacent submarkets with selective lab inventory. We work them when the requirement justifies the geography.

Scope

What we don't do

We are a tenant representation practice. We do not represent landlords on building leasing assignments, we do not run capital markets sales for lab assets, and we do not pitch generic brokerage services to companies that already have a strategy in place. The narrower the focus, the better the work, and the cleaner the alignment with the tenants we represent.

Have a lab decision on the horizon?

The earliest conversations are usually the most valuable, even when they are not yet about a transaction.

We are happy to share what we are seeing in the market, walk through a current lease, or help you think through the right time to start a process.

Talk to the team → Read first