Paul Pariser, Charles Bendit, Colleen Wenke and Chris Balestra

Real estate investment and development firm Taconic Partners has been holding its own recently by leasing up its available space in life sciences while also working to deliver more lab facilities through new construction projects.

Taconic brought key assets to full occupancy, such as the Hudson Research Center in Manhattan, thanks to the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai agreeing to take the last remaining bit in January 2024 — about 10,000 square feet of a 320,000-square-foot building that was once a film studio.

Also, Taconic in summer 2023 opened the Center for Engineering and Precision Medicine at 619 West 54th Street, which will be operated by both the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the Icahn School. Proving the demand in the life sciences market — especially for the sort of top-shelf space that Taconic delivers — novel therapeutics company Graviton Bioscience agreed to a 30,000-square-foot lease in the building almost immediately.

Taconic’s quartet of top leaders — Paul Pariser, Charles Bendit, Colleen Wenke and Chris Balestra — made the best of a tough year in the capital markets in 2023, too, Balestra said, meaning that new acquisitions and new construction projects have not been incubating. “Most of our projects are performing well. I think everyone has some minor challenges with higher interest rates, but we’ve been persevering,” Balestra said.

But it isn’t entirely true that Taconic isn’t looking to build. It recently announced plans with regular partner Nuveen Real Estate for a 28-story, 430,000-square-foot office tower in Manhattan’s Hudson Square known as One Grand. Some 60 percent of the floors there will have outdoor space, according to Wenke.