Research Park lands two tenants

November 12, 2004
By ROBYN L. LAMB,
Daily Record Business Writer

The University of Maryland, Baltimore County's Research and Technology Park has signed two tenants for the second of five planned buildings, suggesting that the tech sector is on the rebound.

The NASA Goddard Earth Sciences and Technology Center and software maker BD Metrics Inc. together will take 20,000 square feet of the 60,000-square-foot building on the university's park, called bwtech@UMBC.

The original plan for the park calls for 300,000 square feet of lab and office space to attract life science and high-technology companies. But progress has been slow.

Its developer, Grosvenor USA Limited, a subsidiary of London-based Grosvenor Group, was brought on in 1999, but the park's first building, which houses a division of RWD Technologies Inc., was not completed until 2001.

The new leases are a sign, however, that the market is picking up and that people are warming to the idea of university-based research parks. First conceptualized in the early 1990s, bwtech@UMBC is the state's first university-based research and technology park.

“I think we have to be patient,” said director of development for Grosvenor, Christian M. Chambers. “It's been a tough couple of years but we remain optimistic.”

To be sure, the market is not as sluggish as it was even a year ago. The inventory of available Class A office space in Baltimore's southern metro area shrank from 2.1 million square feet last year to 1.7 million square feet as of September.

And the BWI submarket is the Baltimore area's strongest office market, with only 5.9 percent of office space vacant.

At prices about $4 less per square foot than the average, the park has a competitive advantage over the likes of Anne Arundel County's National Business Park, for example, which is home to large defense contractors such as Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. and Northrop Grumman Corp., Chambers said.

The relationship with the university is another factor setting the park apart, said its executive director, Ellen Hemmerly.

The original idea was to put firms in the park that have ongoing relationships with the university, such as graduates of the school's on-campus incubator program, techcenter@UMBC.

But until now, none of the program's 20 graduates have taken space there.

BD Metrics, a year-old software maker that has ballooned in size from five partners to 30 employees and was the first incubator company to land at the park, will take about 7,000 square feet of its newest building.

The company's chief executive, Rick Geritz, looked at space around the region but decided on bwtech@UMBC mostly to maintain its connection with the university, from which it has hired a handful of students in the last year.

“I think we will continue to see companies move to the research park because they're collaborating. They have found the value in being there,” said Hemmerly.

While UMBC may have been the first school to build a research park, it is no longer the only one.

At least four university research parks are being built or planned with a combined 5 million square feet of space to be dedicated to the life sciences and high-tech sectors.

The University of Maryland, Baltimore is building the first of eight buildings. East Baltimore Development Inc. is looking for a developer to build a bioscience research park, the centerpiece of an 80-acre neighborhood revitalization in the area north of the Johns Hopkins Hospital. The University of Maryland, College Park just announced the first tenants of a park that could eventually encompass 2 million square feet of commercial space. And officials at Montgomery College are in talks with a private developer to build a 35-acre business park off the I-270 technology corridor.