Don’t Buy a Bad Building!

Buying an existing building for a laboratory can look like the fastest, cheapest path to growth—until the fit-out exposes what the due diligence missed. This session draws from two large, active Eurofins laboratory tenant improvements in San Diego and Rancho Cordova: one confronting difficult base-building conditions in a 100,000-sf facility, the other converting a 75,000-sf former office/light-manufacturing building into an approximately 62,000-sf laboratory program.

Rather than a polished victory lap, this is a candid field guide to the questions you should answer before closing or committing to a lease. The speakers will unpack lessons from inadequate utility capacity and electrical service, water-flow and fire-protection constraints, low floor-to-floor heights, equipment loads, hazardous-material storage, long-lead utility coordination, and the underestimated cost of moving base-building systems.

Attendees will leave with a practical acquisition and early-design checklist: what to verify in the field, which consultants and end users to engage first, how to identify risks that should change the deal price, schedule, or program, and when a bargain building is not a bargain. The session invites audience discussion of “red flags” participants have encountered, creating a usable reference for owners, lab users, brokers, engineers, contractors, and designers at the earliest possible project stage.

Learning objectives:
1. Identify the base-building conditions that can make a laboratory acquisition or lease a costly mistake.
2. Build a due-diligence checklist for utilities, electrical service, fire protection, structural capacity, hazardous materials, and equipment access.
3. Recognize when deficiencies should change the purchase price, lease terms, project schedule, or laboratory program.
4. Engage the right end users, consultants, and contractors early enough to expose risks before design and construction commitments are made.