Life science commercial real estate is one of the most operationally demanding property types in the industry, and it's also one of the most misunderstood by those coming from traditional office or industrial backgrounds. When you see the inside of a top-performing life science campus, you quickly realize the rules are different.
We recently hosted a webinar, "Beyond the Lab: The Modern Approach to Tenant Experience in Life Science Buildings," with Elizabeth Dickey, Senior Director of Operations at BioMed Realty. BioMed is the largest private operator of life science real estate in the world, with approximately 17 million square feet across Boston/Cambridge, San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, Boulder, and Cambridge, UK.
Elizabeth has spent 16 of her 20-plus years in property management inside BioMed, working from the building level up to leading West Coast operations. What she shared was practical, specific, and worth studying closely
If you manage Class A office space, the core product you're delivering is a place to work. In life science real estate, the building itself is a tool; a mission-critical piece of the tenant's research infrastructure. That distinction changes almost everything about how you operate.
Elizabeth put it plainly: "Life science tenants depend on our space as a critical part, a critical tool, to their work. Research and lab operations happen on-site, and collaboration with colleagues is essential to getting those results." Even during the shift to hybrid work that reshaped traditional office demand, life science researchers remained on-site. The decision-makers driving innovation in biotech and pharma companies have always needed to be present. That full-time occupancy pressure raises the stakes on every system in your building.
A typical life science building runs roughly 60 percent lab space and 40 percent office. The lab side carries significant infrastructure requirements: specialized HVAC, vibration control, flexible lab configurations, and the kind of mechanical complexity that makes a standard office buildout look straightforward.
One thing that surprises people new to life sciences real estate is how robust the tenant experience programming is at the best campuses. When you visit a BioMed property like Dexter Yards in Seattle, you don't see just labs and offices. You see a field house used for TED Talks and fitness programming, a beer hall that hosts scientific happy hours, outdoor spaces, cafes, and conference areas designed for fluid indoor-outdoor movement.
This isn't decoration. Elizabeth described the strategic intent clearly: "Amenities and shared spaces are central to that tenant experience. They're not just a perk. They support productivity, collaboration, and community." Life science research tends to happen in tight, focused teams. Researchers learn from each other. Cross-pollination between companies on the same campus accelerates discovery. Spaces that make it easy to step away from the lab, reset, and connect with colleagues from other companies are part of what makes a campus scientifically productive, not just physically comfortable.
BioMed's approach to campus design reflects a whole-person philosophy. Wellness rooms, recreation areas, retail, and social programming address the reality that research is isolating work. When someone is running a clinical trial or analyzing a complex dataset for weeks on end, the ability to walk downstairs for a workout or a casual happy hour with peers from another company matters more than it might in a standard office environment.
One of the most consistent themes in life sciences real estate, and one that Elizabeth returned to repeatedly, is the problem with relying on a single point of contact to communicate with your tenant base. Traditional property management has long defaulted to this model: send an email to the office manager, hope the message reaches the researchers. In a life science building, that approach leaves most of your occupants in the dark.
Elizabeth described the shift BioMed made by moving to a direct, app-based communications and announcements platform across their assets: "Unlike traditional property management methods that we typically in the past would rely on email memos to a single point of contact with your company, [our platform] delivers branded communication that goes directly to all of the users that have the app. So it eliminates those delays and ensures full awareness of what you have happening on your campus, your building, or throughout the portfolio."
The practical impact of that change extends far beyond event announcements. When you can reach every researcher, every operations staff member, and every vendor contact directly through a single channel, your ability to manage the tenant experience at scale improves significantly. You can promote events, manage RSVPs, collect post-event feedback, and issue real-time building updates without relying on information traveling through intermediaries. Commercial real estate, tenant satisfaction correlates strongly with responsiveness and transparency from building management. Communication gaps remain one of the top-cited sources of friction in occupant surveys.
Elizabeth identified the most common places tenant experience breaks down in life science commercial real estate. Understanding these friction points is the starting point for addressing them.
Critical system downtime tops the list. Even a brief disruption to HVAC, water supply, or lab utilities can throw off experiments that have been running for weeks. The tolerance for infrastructure failure is essentially zero. Preventive maintenance scheduling and proactive work order management are non-negotiable when the cost of an unplanned outage includes compromised research outcomes.
Slow maintenance response is a close second. When researchers are laser-focused on time-sensitive work, delays in fixing access issues, equipment problems, or facility concerns create real frustration. Elizabeth's framing is worth internalizing: "Our tenants are focused. They're laser-focused on the wonderful work they're doing. We're trying to stay out of their way."
Communication gaps remain a structural problem at buildings that rely on traditional methods. Important information about system updates, scheduled shutdowns, or event programming fails to reach the people who need it. In a campus with dozens of companies and hundreds of individual occupants, information bottlenecks at the company contact level create unnecessary friction.
Rigid layouts and scheduling restrictions also came up. Life science research evolves fast. A team that needed a certain lab configuration six months ago may need something entirely different today. Spaces and amenity booking systems that can flex with changing needs are far more valuable than those that require lengthy approval processes or forced workarounds.
Missing or inadequate wellness and community spaces affect retention in ways that don't always show up until a renewal conversation. Elizabeth described these as "essential to the holistic health of the researchers on site," not a secondary consideration.
Running a life science campus well requires a balancing act that Elizabeth described with notable clarity. The operational complexity is significant. The tenant-facing experience needs to feel effortless. Achieving both at the same time requires systems that handle routine work automatically, so your team can focus on the interactions that actually require human judgment.
BioMed has built that capability by combining automated workflows for maintenance, access control, and service requests with a team structure that includes dedicated tenant experience and activation staff. The technology layer handles the volume. The people handle the relationship. Elizabeth put it directly: "Technology platforms, our integrated building systems, streamlined workflows take those routine tasks and maintenance and let our operations team solve problems before tenants can notice. At the same time, they free up the staff to focus on those high-touch interactions like personalized support, wellness initiatives, curated programming."
This is also where the link between building maintenance and tenant experience becomes most visible. When your preventive maintenance program is running well and documented properly, you have the operational confidence to focus on experience. When systems are failing reactively, your team spends all its time putting out fires. The two are inseparable.
Elizabeth also made a point that gets overlooked in technology-focused conversations: personal relationships are the foundation. "When we have that relationship with our tenants and we hit a hiccup, it's so much easier, when you've developed that relationship, to go talk to your tenants and say, 'Hey, this is what happened. This is what we're going to do differently next time.'" Trust built over years of consistent follow-through is what makes that conversation possible.
The audience asked a sharp question during the webinar: beyond renewal rates, what leading indicators tell you the tenant experience is actually working? Elizabeth's answer focused on structured, actionable feedback cycles rather than passive data collection.
BioMed uses a tenant satisfaction survey on a bi-annual basis, reviewing results against prior cycles to track improvement and identify persistent gaps. But the survey is only as useful as what happens after you collect the responses. Elizabeth was direct about this: "It's not just about getting those answers from your tenants. It's what you do with it. I want our tenants to understand that their voice matters."
That philosophy shapes how feedback flows into budgeting decisions, programming changes, and service adjustments. Tenants who see their input reflected in how the building operates become invested in the relationship. Those who never see any change in response to their feedback stop engaging, and their dissatisfaction compounds quietly until renewal conversations become difficult.
Elizabeth also noted something that speaks to the tight-knit nature of the life science community: she has worked with individual researchers across 16 years and multiple different companies. In a sector where talent moves between organizations but often stays within the same geographic cluster of buildings, the relationship you build with a researcher today may extend across three or four future employers. That kind of continuity raises the long-term value of every positive interaction.
Looking ahead, Elizabeth sees the tenant experience in life science real estate continuing to evolve toward more integrated, data-driven, and community-centered campuses. AI is accelerating the pace of discovery on the research side, which has direct implications for the physical environments housing that work. Data analysis that previously took months now happens in hours. Research models are more predictive and flexible. The FDA's push to move away from animal testing models may reshape lab space requirements significantly over the next decade.
For the life science real estate companies competing for top tenants, the infrastructure and operational bar will continue to rise. Tenants will expect real-time visibility into building systems, seamless visitor access management, mobile-enabled access credentials, and programming that actively supports both their professional development and personal well-being. The campuses that build those ecosystems intentionally will retain tenants. The ones that treat those elements as secondary to the physical space will find themselves at a disadvantage in renewal conversations.
Elizabeth's summary of where it all points was direct: "Tenants want buildings that go beyond simply housing their research. They want spaces that enable innovation and foster community and support the people and the science driving that progress."
That framing should inform every capital planning decision, operational investment, and technology choice you make in managing a life science portfolio.
Running a life science portfolio at the level BioMed has built requires the right operational foundation. If you want to see how you can optimize your life science portfolio just like BioMed, book a demo to see Cove in action.