Savills’ head of office for Cambridge has left after 16 years at the agency, to set up an investment and development firm specialising in the fast-growing science and technology sectors.
Rob Sadler (pictured) has co-founded Matthews & Sadler Estates with Jason Matthews, previously director of estate strategy at the University of Cambridge.
Between them, the pair have led and supported more than £1bn of investment in the two sectors. Both have experience in the Golden Triangle of London, Oxford and Cambridge, as well as globally in the Asia-Pacific region, Australia, the US and the Middle East.
The company is targeting a portfolio of £2bn to £3bn GAV, with assets across the UK and Europe. The goal is to strike around 10 to 15 acquisitions per year.
It is thought that the duo have secured backing from Cerberus Capital Management, and are in talks to advance this to an exclusive basis. Both parties declined to comment on those discussions.
Matthews & Sadler will work with academic, public and private sector communities that invest in creating and developing science and research spaces, particularly on the front line of drug, therapy and device development.
Sadler told EG: “There is something quite special happening in the industry. Because of the pandemic, life sciences and technology have been at the forefront of commercial enterprise in the past 12 months.
“There is a niche in the market, in that there is a lot of appetite for investing in this sector, but limited experience in the UK from those who have brought forward developments in key locations.”
Matthews said: “On the basis that we can get the returns, I don’t think there’s any ceiling to [how much we’ll deploy]. Through BioMed Realty, Blackstone has shown us what can be achieved in those markets.”
The pair highlight Cambridge, Oxford and parts of London as “obvious places” for acquisitions, as well as 20 key locations for expansion including the Benelux countries, France, Germany, Denmark, Norway and Iceland.
The company will begin by looking at ground-up development opportunities, including brownfield sites, as well as science parks that it can both invest in and build. “There aren’t a tremendous number of core investment properties in the right locations that we’re looking for, so we have to look at creating them,” Sadler said.
Where tech meets science
Technology such as AI and quantum computing is changing the dynamics of laboratories, and the pair say that will shape their criteria for acquisitions. Science and technology are “not disparate” anymore, Matthews said, despite requiring vastly different physical structures.
“They meet in the middle,” added Sadler. “It’s the tech companies forging ahead with the data and analytical work to speed up [distribution] from the pharma companies. Although they require two different types of property, we see this merging and changing.”
The new company will also explore urbanising laboratory spaces – an area in which the UK lags behind its US counterparts by “around five to 10 years”, according to Sadler.
“If you look at where the majority of life science and laboratory buildings are located in the UK, they tend to be in out-of-town, rural, leafy locations,” Sadler added. “What we haven’t seen until now is the urbanisation of laboratory spaces, mainly because people think that you can’t build a high-rise laboratory. But if you look at Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, there are 18-storey towers.
“We will start to see a lot more urban laboratory accommodation coming through. The market needs to mature, and to look at how others have been doing it.”
Repurposing empty retail spaces, where there is proximity to universities and relevant talent pools, could also form part of the equation, Sadler said.
“From a practical point of view, stores can offer the right floor-to-ceiling heights for laboratory space and they have rear loading capacity, so why not create a cluster and a community within a shopping arcade?” he added.
“Just taking a location on a street in Cambridge in the historic city centre wouldn’t work on a practical level, but there is scope to repurpose some of the larger complexes.”
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