Life sciences real estate transactions carry a level of technical complexity that standard office or industrial RFP templates simply cannot address, and the difference between a well-structured RFP and a generic one often determines whether a tenant ends up with a building that truly supports their science or one that quietly constrains it for the length of a ten-year lease.
Why a Lab Space RFP Is Different From Any Other Occupier Brief
A laboratory is not an office with fume hoods. The infrastructure requirements — electrical capacity, mechanical systems, plumbing, vibration isolation, biosafety classification — are capital-intensive and largely irreversible once a building is delivered. A tenant that discovers mid-negotiation that a landlord's mechanical plant cannot support BSL-2 wet labs has already spent weeks or months in a process that will not produce a lease. The RFP is the instrument that prevents that outcome.
The document also establishes negotiating posture. When a tenant asks specific, technical questions in writing before issuing letters of intent, the landlord community understands that this occupier knows what they need. That signal alone changes how proposals are structured, how earnestly landlords engage their own engineers, and ultimately how competitive the economics become. A vague brief invites vague proposals.
Life sciences tenant representation has matured significantly over the past decade as more institutional capital has entered the sector. Landlords in established cluster markets have grown sophisticated at marketing shell conditions, warm shell builds, and cold dark shell product to different tenant profiles. Understanding the spectrum is the tenant's responsibility, and a well-built RFP forces every respondent to answer on the same axis so that proposals can be compared side by side on a meaningful basis rather than on marketing language alone.
Question 1 — What Is the Confirmed Electrical Service Capacity and Path to Expansion?
Laboratory operations are power-intensive in ways that almost no other commercial occupancy is. High-performance liquid chromatography equipment, biosafety cabinets, ultra-low temperature freezers, and central chilled water systems collectively draw sustained loads that can exceed twenty watts per square foot in a dense research environment. A standard office building is typically designed for five to eight watts per square foot of tenant electrical load. The gap is not a rounding error.
The RFP should ask each landlord to confirm the existing service amperage available at the suite level, the transformer capacity dedicated to tenant use, and the physical path by which additional capacity could be added if the tenant's needs grow. Confirming these numbers in writing during the RFP process, rather than relying on marketing materials, protects the tenant against future disputes about what was represented.
Emergency and standby power is equally important. Life sciences operations often involve irreplaceable cell cultures, reagents, or biological samples that cannot survive a power interruption. The RFP should ask whether the building has generator capacity, what percentage of tenant electrical load that generator can support, and how quickly automatic transfer switches engage. Some landlords provide only life-safety standby power; others offer full critical-load coverage. Knowing which you are dealing with before the LOI is signed shapes the entire negotiation over tenant improvement allowances and base building obligations.
Question 2 — What Are the HVAC Specifications for Lab Zones, and Who Maintains the Systems?
Heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning in a laboratory setting involves a level of precision that has no parallel in conventional commercial buildings. Lab spaces frequently require 100 percent outside air systems because recirculating air in a space where chemical fumes, biohazards, or particulates may be present is not acceptable. The air changes per hour must be specified at the zone level, not the building average, and the RFP should ask for that data room by room if the space has a defined layout.
The RFP should also ask how the mechanical system handles after-hours demand. Many life sciences operations run experiments around the clock, and a building whose HVAC system throttles down at 6 p.m. to reduce energy costs creates a real operational problem. Tenants should ask whether the landlord supports full mechanical capacity on an unrestricted basis and what the economic structure for after-hours air looks like under the base lease form.
Maintenance responsibility is a separate but related issue. In a building designed for life sciences, the mechanical systems are more complex, more expensive to maintain, and more consequential when they fail. The RFP should ask the landlord to specify which components are base building obligations, which become tenant obligations at the lease commencement date, and what service-level commitments the landlord makes with respect to response time on mechanical failures. Some landlords include this detail in their building rules; others leave it to negotiation. Getting the answer during the RFP stage sets up the lease negotiation efficiently.
Question 3 — How Is the Building Classified for Biosafety, and What Does That Permit?
Biosafety level classification governs what research activities can legally and physically be conducted in a given space. BSL-1 and BSL-2 work represent the vast majority of academic and commercial life sciences activity and can often be accommodated in purpose-built lab buildings without extraordinary structural intervention. BSL-3 work requires significant engineering controls — sealed rooms, dedicated HVAC with HEPA filtration, autoclaves, controlled access — that most commercial buildings are not built to support and that retrofitting a standard shell for BSL-3 is a significant capital undertaking.
The RFP should ask the landlord to confirm what biosafety level the base building infrastructure supports, what approvals or permits exist, and whether the building's institutional biosafety committee or local regulatory authority has reviewed the design. Tenants pursuing BSL-2 work should still ask this question because the answer reveals how the landlord has thought about the building, how seriously they understand the tenant's regulatory environment, and what precedent exists in the building for similar use.
Chemical storage and hazardous materials handling intersect with biosafety classification. The RFP should ask whether the building has dedicated chemical storage rooms with appropriate ventilation, whether hazardous materials are regulated at the building level under a consolidated permit, and how a new tenant's chemical inventory integrates with existing tenants' permits. In multi-tenant life sciences buildings, the chemical permit is often held by the landlord as a building-level umbrella, and the process for adding a new tenant to that permit is neither automatic nor instantaneous. Surfacing this issue in the RFP avoids a permitting delay between lease signing and occupancy.
Question 4 — What Plumbing Infrastructure Exists, and What Does the Tenant Improvement Scope Cover?
Wet lab work requires a density of plumbing infrastructure that most commercial buildings were never designed to support. Deionized water lines, acid-neutralization systems, glass-wash stations, and floor drains with appropriate traps are standard expectations in a functional research lab. In a shell building, none of these may exist. In a warm shell, some may be roughed in. In a full lab-ready building, they may be fully operational.
The RFP should require each landlord to specify exactly what plumbing infrastructure exists at the time of proposal, what the tenant improvement allowance covers, and what the landlord will pre-fund or deliver as part of the base building. This is one of the most financially material questions in the entire RFP because plumbing infrastructure in a lab can represent a significant portion of the total fit-out cost. A tenant who receives a higher nominal TI allowance from one landlord but must fund a DI water system and an acid drain from that allowance may be worse off than a tenant receiving a lower TI allowance from a building that already has those systems in place.
The question of who owns the tenant improvement work after completion also belongs in the RFP. Some landlords treat specialized lab infrastructure as landlord property that stays with the building at lease expiration; others treat it as tenant property subject to removal obligations. Restoration obligations on specialized MEP infrastructure can be material — removing a gas distribution system or a specialized exhaust plenum involves real cost. Clarifying this in the RFP allows the tenant to model the true total occupancy cost before signing a letter of intent.
Question 5 — What Structural Load Capacity Does the Floor Support, and Is Vibration Isolation Available?
Laboratory equipment can be extraordinarily heavy. Centrifuges, mass spectrometry instruments, liquid nitrogen storage dewars, and autoclave units impose point loads and distributed loads that exceed the structural assumptions embedded in standard office construction. The RFP should ask each landlord to provide the floor-to-floor structural capacity in pounds per square foot for the spaces being offered and to confirm whether any areas have enhanced load capacity for equipment-intensive uses.
Vibration sensitivity is the mirror image of weight. Certain analytical instruments — including atomic force microscopes, NMR spectrometers, and some confocal imaging systems — require environments with extremely low ambient vibration. Building mechanical systems, elevators, street traffic, and even HVAC fans can produce vibration signatures that render a space unusable for sensitive instrumentation. The RFP should ask whether the building has been vibration-characterized and whether the landlord can provide floor vibration data for the relevant floors.
This question also surfaces the issue of rooftop equipment and neighboring tenant operations. A building that houses a compressor farm on the roof directly above a tenant's imaging suite may be structurally adequate but operationally unsuitable. Asking about the full building equipment map during the RFP stage allows the tenant to identify conflicts before they become embedded in lease terms.
Question 6 — What Are the Lease Economics, and How Is Effective Rent Calculated Across the Full Term?
The financial structure of a life sciences lease differs from a conventional office lease in several important ways. The tenant improvement allowance is typically higher, the landlord's base building delivery obligation is more complex, and the free rent period — if any — is often shorter relative to the build-out period because lab construction timelines are long. Understanding these dynamics is what the 7 Questions Life Sciences Tenants Should Put in a Lab Space RFP framework is ultimately built around: connecting technical adequacy to economic reality.
The RFP should ask each landlord to provide a full-term cash flow model showing gross rent, net effective rent after TI amortization, operating expense treatment, and the economic impact of any base building work that the landlord is characterizing as a landlord obligation versus an above-standard TI expenditure. Effective rent calculation using a lease NPV model — discounting the full cash obligation at the tenant's cost of capital — is the correct comparison tool. Gross face rent numbers without TI, free rent, and operating expense assumptions baked in are not comparable and should not be used as the primary evaluation metric.
Operating expense pass-throughs deserve particular attention in life sciences buildings because the MEP systems are expensive to operate. HVAC, water, and electricity costs in a lab building often exceed those in a comparable office building by a material margin. The RFP should ask each landlord to provide historical operating expense data for the building, distinguish between fixed and variable expense components, and confirm whether any cap or base applies to operating expense increases under the proposed lease structure. Some landlords in newer lab buildings also pass through the cost of hazardous materials management services; others absorb those costs. Getting the detail in writing at the RFP stage protects against surprises in the first year of occupancy.
Deal-execution timelines are another economic variable that belongs in the RFP response. Landlords should be asked to identify the lead time from LOI execution to permit issuance, from permit issuance to substantial completion, and from substantial completion to a tenant occupancy date that supports full operations. A building that prices competitively on rent but adds four months to the construction timeline imposes a real carrying cost on the tenant — continued payment at the existing location, delayed revenue from new research programs, extended project overhead. That cost should be part of the full economic comparison.
Structuring the RFP Response Evaluation
Once responses arrive, the evaluation process requires a structured methodology rather than a qualitative reading of each landlord's marketing narrative. A scoring matrix that weights technical adequacy, financial economics, and landlord capability across the specific dimensions raised in the seven questions produces a defensible shortlist. The weights themselves should reflect the tenant's actual priorities — a BSL-2 tenant running high-throughput screening has different infrastructure priorities than a device company doing bench chemistry.
Financial modeling at this stage means building a full-term cash flow comparison for each finalist property using consistent assumptions. Lease NPV calculation — using the tenant's weighted average cost of capital as the discount rate — normalizes differences in TI structure, free rent periods, and operating expense treatment. Without this step, it is genuinely difficult to determine which property is cheaper over the lease term, because the headline rent tells almost none of the story.
The evaluation process should also include a site visit protocol that maps directly to the seven RFP questions. Walking a space after reviewing the written RFP responses allows the tenant and their technical advisers to verify represented conditions, identify discrepancies between what was written and what exists in the building, and develop a final negotiating position. Discrepancies surfaced during site visits — a mechanical room that is more constrained than represented, a floor plate with post spacing that creates layout problems — are far easier to address before the LOI than after it.
How Advisers Should Present Recommendations to Life Sciences Clients
Tenant representation in life sciences real estate involves translating highly technical information into a recommendation that a CFO, CSO, and facilities team can evaluate together. The recommendation memo is the instrument for that translation, and it should organize information in the same sequence as the RFP questions — moving from technical adequacy to financial economics to execution risk. A property that fails on technical adequacy should not advance regardless of its financial merits.
Advisers should be explicit about assumptions. When a lease NPV model shows one property as twenty percent cheaper than another — using a hypothetical example to illustrate the method — the recommendation should state the discount rate used, the operating expense growth assumption applied, and the TI adequacy assumption embedded in the comparison. Clients who understand the assumptions are better positioned to challenge them, update them as negotiations develop, and ultimately make a decision they stand behind.
Advisers working on complex life sciences requirements should also maintain a critical-date register from the day the RFP is issued. RFP response deadlines, site visit windows, shortlist notification dates, LOI target dates, permitting lead times, and construction commencement milestones should all be tracked with named owners. A single missed date in a lab construction timeline can cascade into a delayed occupancy date, which in turn delays scientific programs that may be operating on a clinical or regulatory schedule. The stakes are real and the calendar discipline must match them.
Negotiating the Lease After the RFP Process
The RFP process does not conclude with a landlord selection. It concludes with a clearly ranked shortlist and a documented basis for that ranking — and that documentation becomes the foundation of the lease negotiation. Every technical commitment a landlord made in their RFP response should appear in the lease as a landlord delivery obligation, a base building specification, or a warranty. Verbal commitments made during the RFP process that do not survive into the lease document do not exist.
Lease negotiation in life sciences transactions should proceed in parallel with the work letter negotiation. The work letter — which specifies the tenant improvement scope, the landlord's base building delivery standard, and the process for design approval and construction management — is often more consequential to the tenant's operational outcome than the economic terms in the base lease. A work letter that leaves the base building specification vague exposes the tenant to disputes about what was included in the TI allowance and what constitutes above-standard work that the tenant must fund separately.
About Advantai
Advantai is a commercial real estate intelligence and operations platform operated by ADVANTAGE AI LLC, a Delaware limited liability company. It connects client relationships, property research, documents and financial decisions in one workspace for commercial real estate teams — advisers and brokerage teams, occupier and facility teams, and portfolio teams. The platform covers CRM and origination, requirements and site selection, Property X-Ray (an interactive 3D building workspace), financial modeling and comparison, document intelligence, transactions and diligence, client collaboration, and portfolio strategy with critical dates. The optional Super Agent upgrade adds specialist, source-backed research and automated scenario analysis.
Get Started with Advantai
Ready to see your next move clearly? Go to advantaico.com, click Request a demo and tell us about your next project. Prefer to start with a single project? Visit advantaico.com/getting-started to plan your first one.