Adam Sichol, Jamie Peschel and Jessica Brock

Longfellow Real Estate Partners has turned the hyper-specialized alternative asset class of laboratory real estate into a science nationwide.

Co-founders Adam Sichol and Jamie Peschel, along with their partner in real estate operations, Jessica Brock, run the Boston-based company that has become the largest privately owned life sciences real estate developer and manager in the U.S. with more than 16 million square feet and over $10 billion in total asset value. Longfellow was busy in 2023 expanding its presence in the face of economic and market headwinds, and has continued to expand in a choppy 2024.

This comes despite a slowdown in demand for life sciences space amid slowing job growth and reduced investment in the sector. Longfellow, and its primary rival Alexandria Real Estate Equities, are perhaps the only developers in the space that can weather such trends successfully. 

“In the next 12 to 18 months, we will see the delivery of our first two all-electric life science buildings, Bioterra in San Diego and Avia Labs in the San Francisco Bay Area, as well state-of-the-art lab spaces in conversion projects across the United States and United Kingdom,” the three company leaders said in a joint statement. 

In fact, that 315,000-square-foot Avia Labs will be the first all-electric life sciences campus in California. 

Meanwhile, in April 2024, Longfellow completed an office-to-lab conversion in Rockville, Md., for the company’s first project along the Interstate 270 biotech corridor. The company bought the 193,570-square-foot office property in 2022 and transformed it into a seven-story building with two 15,000-square-foot outfitted labs, and five contiguous floors of lab-ready space spanning 155,122 square feet.

Longfellow also recently completed the transformation of a decaying 1920s warehouse and former parachute manufacturing plant in Long Island City, Queens, into another seven-story property with a mix of life sciences labs and offices.