Dr. Jin, co-founder of Elixir Biotech Real Estate, talked about the momentum for life science park is buildung up. 

I quitted my job last year and looked for new career direction. I want to do something new, but not completlely away from my past experience.

In real estate investment, there is a term called asset class, certain type of asset with similar functionalities is classified into one group, such as office, shopping centers and hotel.

These are the most traditional asset class in commercial properties. Over the last two decades investors are pulling a lot of capital into these so-called mainstream asset class. Transactions are active until recently. 

Our economy and property market do go up and down in cyclical movement. Transactions will rebound someday as the economy rebound.

But if we look at the economy carefully, there are some industry sectors do perform much better than the others in last ten years. 

For example, 10 years ago we don’t have e-commerce business, e-commerce drives demand in logistics and warehouse.

5 years ago we didn’t have 5G, cloud computing, big data and  AI technologies as we heavily deploy these technologies today, the rapid development of TMT sector drives a demand for data-centers.

These days E-commece, internet and TMT are new industries, new economy drivers, they grow much faster than those usual old economy engines like financial, trading, manufacturing and real estate. The new industries propel new assets.

Logistics, warehouse and datacenters are new asset class, alternative to old asset class, gaining more investors favors these days.

Understand this, if my new company want to find a successful way, I  need to find a new economy industry driver and luckily I find one – the biotech industry.

Like the e-commerce boosting logistics warehouse, internet for datacenter, the biotech industry will spell out opportunity for a new asset class – laboratory space.

In the US it has been developed over 30 years, the scale is about 14.mn sq.m, about the same scale of the Grade A office market in Puxi Shanghai.

Laboratory space for biotech industry is a very niche market, but its development is at the nascent stage of development. We see a growing demand from the tenants. There is an opportunity for early mover advantage. We can grow much more faster at the early stage of market development if we can build some momentum quicker than others.

Elixir is a pionner in life science asset class. My job is to go out to the market, champion the life science real estate story, “It is time to invest Right Now and Go Big.”