Taconic's Never-Opened Lab Building Sells for $73.1M

Taconic Partners has sold Iron Horse Labs, the unfinished life-sciences building at 309 East 94th Street on the Upper East Side, to LCOR for $73.1 million. The building has no tenants and no certificate of occupancy. Taconic and its partners bought the property in 2021 for $70 million.

Why it matters

This is the cleanest available comp for what a New York lab conversion actually returns when the demand never arrives. Taconic took a five-story commercial building and permitted it up to nine, financed the work with a $78.8 million construction loan from Ares Commercial Real Estate in 2022, and marketed the space at $52 per square foot. The exit is $3.1 million above the acquisition price and well below acquisition plus the construction facility. A sponsor underwriting a conversion in any specialty use, lab, medical office or studio, now has a number for the downside case rather than a narrative about it.

It is also the second life-sciences exit Taconic’s Elevate Research Properties has taken this year. In July it sold 125 West End Avenue for $260 million after roughly $600 million of acquisition and development spending.

The numbers

The city’s own file tells the construction story more precisely than the sale does. The Buildings Department carries the job as an ALT-CO, new building with existing elements to remain, going from five stories to nine across 165,860 square feet, with structural work permitted at $16.9 million, mechanical at $10.4 million, plumbing at $3.2 million and fuel storage and generator work at $3.4 million. The owner of record on every one of those filings is an entity named 309 E 94th St Property Owner LLC. Taconic has marketed the finished building at 200,000 square feet across eight stories. What the permits show is a full vertical and horizontal enlargement carried nearly to completion and then stopped short of occupancy.

What’s next

LCOR inherits a building that needs a certificate of occupancy and a use. The open question for the Upper East Side is whether the next owner keeps it as lab space at $52 per square foot or repositions it, which is the same question facing the Manhattan conversion pipeline more broadly. Our New York coverage is tracking both.