CRE Broker Uses F-Word To Describe Palm Beach County’s Biotech Dreams

Visions of drug plants, wet labs and incubator space once danced in the heads of Palm Beach County’s commercial real estate brokers and developers. But a decade after former Gov. Jeb Bush recruited the Scripps Research Institute to Florida, those dreams remain just a dream.

Perhaps patience is wearing thin among the commercial real estate types who once embraced the fantasy of a thriving biotech sector. Consider this exchange  during Thursday night’s NAIOP South Florida event in West Palm Beach.

“I don’t even really know what to ask,” said Todd Everett, a broker at Marcus & Millichap and moderator of a panel discussion. “Is this our legacy, or is this a flop?”

“It’s slow in maturing,” said Jonathan Satter, a broker at Avison Young. “There’s a long way to go.”

Despite Florida’s $1.5 billion bet on biotech, private-sector spin-offs are nearly non-existent.

Bush, who worked in commercial real estate for a time before he was elected governor, insisted that northern Palm Beach County would need 8 million square feet of space for biotech companies. But Scripps spinoffs take little more than a few thousand square feet of space in Jupiter.

 

Source:  Palm Beach Post