Thomas Breen photo
300 George St., now owned by Yale.
Yale University dropped more than $139.6 million to purchase one of downtown’s largest pieces of med-tech real estate, in a part of the city bursting with new lab and office towers.
It doesn’t plan “immediately” to stop paying taxes on the building.
According to the city’s land records database, Yale paid $139,687,378 on Nov. 30 to WE George Street LLC to buy the nine-story biomedical research building at 300 George St.
The previous owner of the property, an affiliate of the Massachusetts-based lab builder and Yale partner Winstanley Enterprises, last paid $27.5 million to purchase that same property — which used to be a Southern New England Telephone Company (SNET) call-center — back in 2000. The city last appraised the property for tax purposes as worth $109,085,100.
The 300 George St. building houses a mix of research labs and office space occupied primarily by Yale and Yale New Haven Hospital. Current occupants of the building, according to the lobby’s directory, include Yale’s Health Justice Lab and Keck Mass Spectrometry / Proteomics, the Yale Cancer Center’s Breast Medical Oncology and Clinical Trials Office, Yale New Haven Hospital’s Institute for Excellence, Yale’s Flow Cytometry Core Facility and Keck Biotechnology Resource Lab, Alexion Pharmaceuticals, NIPRO Corporation, and Yale’s Department of Neurology and Immunobiology and Human and Translational Immunology Program.
“Over the years, Yale has continued to invest both dollars and people into this building with Yale’s occupancy reaching 75% of mostly life-science laboratory space this year,” Yale Associate Vice President and Director of New Haven Affairs Lauren Zucker wrote in an email comment provided for this article.
“300 George, and Yale’s occupancy, instigated and anchored the life science industry in New Haven. This location facilitated and enabled the city’s Downtown Crossing project, creating a significant number of jobs, both in construction and in full time permanent positions. No state or city money has ever been used in the repurpose of 300 George Street since its former life as SNET headquarters.
“The University does not plan on taking the property off of the tax rolls immediately. However, to the extent it does so in the future, Yale will follow the terms of the partnership agreement with the city. Yale continues to expand its research base in New Haven into areas that will support the continued growth of the private sector as well.”
That agreement, approved by the Board of Alders in April 2022, states that, for any properties that Yale converts to a tax-exempt use over the course of the six-year city-Yale deal, the university will pay the city over the subsequent 12 years a declining portion of the taxes that would otherwise be owed.
According to the city’s tax collector website, this fiscal year’s local real estate tax bill for 300 George St. is just over $3 million.
The property is right on the northern edge of Yale’s medical campus in the Hill, and is adjacent to two of the newest and largest lab buildings in town at 100 and 101 College St. — both of which were built by and are owned by affiliates of Winstanley. (100 College, also known as the Alexion building, has been open since 2016, while 101 College is in the latter stages of construction.) The sale comes three years after Winstanley purchased the nearby Temple Medical Center for $21 million as part of its own expansion in downtown lab-office real estate. And it comes as still another builder, called Ancora, is getting ready to build a new 11-story lab and office building atop a “10th Square” surface parking lot a few blocks away on a corner of the old Coliseum site.
According to the Winstanley website, SNET first constructed the 300 George St. building as a call-center back in 1959. When AT&T acquired SNET in the 1990s and relocated its employees, the company left the building vacant, according to this writeup. When Winstnaley bought the property in 2000, it was only 25 percent leased.
“Winstanley immediately commenced a comprehensive environmental remediation and base building redevelopment initiative to enable the building to support Yale University’s research and the City’s growing life sciences industry,” the website description continues. “This included designing and investing in the infrastructure to vertically distribute these services to the tenants and monitor their consumption and use. The building’s efficient design and embedded systems offer lab tenants lower upfront build-out costs and lower on-going occupancy costs.”
The site states that the property has been fully leased since 2005 to Yale, Yale New Haven Hospital, and “a variety of publicly traded and venture-backed biotechnology companies. The area around Yale New Haven Hospital and the Yale University School of Medicine is home to numerous biotech companies and non-profit research organizations. 300 George Street has allowed the majority of this spin-off economic development to remain in New Haven, and has played an integral role in the City’s growing biotechnology sector.”
The property deal comes a few weeks after, closer to Yale’s downtown campus, the university spent $7 million buying two commercial properties on Broadway’s stretch of storefronts.
