LCOR Acquires Upper East Side Life Sciences Site From Taconic for $73 Million

LCOR Acquires Upper East Side Life Sciences Site From Taconic for $73 Million

Multifamily developer LCOR has acquired a life sciences development site at 309 East 94th Street on Manhattan’s Upper East Side for $73 million, according to city records filed Thursday, taking over a project that seller Taconic Partners and its joint venture partners had planned as a research laboratory campus.

The roughly 87,000-square-foot assemblage, situated between First and Second avenues, traded at a modest premium to the $70 million all-cash price the site fetched in December 2021, when it was purchased from the Karten family by Taconic, its subsidiary Elevate Research Properties, Nuveen Real Estate and Flatiron Equities.

That venture had envisioned an eight-story, 200,000-square-foot Class A laboratory building branded Iron Horse Labs, positioned near major academic medical institutions including Rockefeller University, Mount Sinai Medical Center and NYC Health + Hospitals. The project obtained a $79 million construction loan from Ares Commercial Real Estate in 2022 and broke ground in 2023, though the site still holds an existing five-story loft building, a two-story garage and an auto shop, leaving the current state of construction unclear.

The disposition is the second life sciences exit for Taconic this year. In July, the firm sold West End Labs at 125 West End Avenue — part of its 3.4-acre West End Campus — for $188 million.

LCOR, best known for East Coast residential development, recently expanded into South Florida’s housing market, and the purchase signals continued investor appetite for well-located development parcels even as specialized lab conversions face a more selective financing environment. Deal activity of this kind is closely tracked by commercial real estate services firms; shares of CBRE Group, the largest such brokerage by market capitalization at roughly $42.8 billion, closed at $140.87 on Thursday, up 2.08% from a prior close of $137.99.

What to watch

• Whether LCOR retains the Iron Horse Labs plan or pivots the site toward residential use, given its multifamily focus.
• Status of the existing Ares construction loan and any refinancing tied to the new ownership.
• Future filings in city records that could reveal additional dispositions from Taconic’s life sciences portfolio.
• Q3 earnings updates from commercial brokerages such as CBRE for broader transaction-market signals.

Source: original release