David Tyndall understands full well the possibility that a unique anchor tenant of the latest building his company and its partner bought in town may well someday leave. But when an affiliate of The University Financing Foundation (TUFF) and his Collaborative Real Estate bought the building at 700 Technology Drive at the Pittsburgh Technology Center early this year, Tyndall had been itching for an opportunity to deal with its owner, Carnegie Mellon University, for years as part of larger goals.
“We don’t usually buy a building for a university to leave,” said Tyndall, founder and CEO of Atlanta-based Collaborative Real Estate, which works hand in hand with TUFF on research-related properties and projects in a host of cities around the country.
So an affiliate of the two firms called 700 Technology Drive Owner LLC bought the 700 Technology Drive building known as Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center in January for $11.65 million.
Now, TUFF and Collaborative Real Estate own two buildings at PTC, one predominantly occupied by tenants affiliated with researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and UPMC at Bridgeside Point and the new one by Carnegie Mellon. There, CMU and its ETC program incorporate a unique blend of disciplines from which its students have gone on to careers with such companies as Pixar, Disney, Electronic Arts and many others in a program that blends the latest video game technology and storytelling.
“One of the reasons I love Carnegie Mellon so much is they have off-the-charts computational resources and fine arts,” said Tyndall.
The ETC has at varying times been a candidate to leave and move elsewhere to a facility better suited for the nature of the program, at one time considering a move to 31st Street Studios in the Strip District among other prospects. Tyndall said he’s discussed that as a possibility with Carnegie Mellon, but expects the building will continue to be in demand for other research users, whether ETC stays or goes.
Currently, ETC occupies about 60,000 square feet of the building, which was originally built in the early 1990s for what was then called the “Carnegie Research Institute.” The building is also occupied by the University of Pittsburgh’s Drug Discovery Institute.
TUFF and Collaborative Real Estate are now calling the property Hot Metal Labs as they seek tenants for the vacant 20,000 square feet in the building. They’re working to cross-pollinate relationships in the building with those at Bridgeside and at other neighboring buildings in the business park.
Dominick Constanza, an asset manager for Collaborative Real Estate, said he doesn’t think people realize the high level of research happening at the PTC, whether in his company’s properties or at the Riviera, the innovation and technology center for Braskem America or others.
He sees PTC as where the university resources of Oakland and the private companies in the life sciences set up on the South Side converge.
“You can already start to see the manifesting of both of those worlds colliding together” at the PTC, said Constanza.
Tyndall and Constanza are having larger conversations with other neighboring stakeholders about rebranding a larger portion of the PTC site as a Hot Metal campus. That includes an open 5.5-acre site that’s part of the Bridgeside Point property on the other side of the Hot Metal Bridge that flows into the Hazelwood Green master plan on which both Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh are each building their own projects now.
The open Bridgeside Point parcel is under long-term consideration for mixed-use plans that could include housing and retail along with more research facilities for a site on which zoning allows in the range of 700,000 square feet of new development.
Tyndall’s focus is on continuing to build relationships in his firm’s two buildings and with researchers elsewhere at both universities with the goal of building out an evolving research campus.
“It is the most exciting university environment we see in the country,” said Tyndall. “That’s why we came to Pittsburgh.”