The Hurley Group of New Haven is converting a multitenant office building at 55 Church St. in New Haven into lab-ready space for the Elm City’s growing biotech cluster. Image courtesy of The Hurley Group and Svigals + Partners

A New Haven office block converted into small lab suites has landed three new tenants despite the nationwide slowdown in life science tenant demand.

The 114,000-square-foot Elm City Bioscience Center at 55 Church St. signed a company that spun out of Yale University and a fellow early-stage firm for suites totaling over 14,000 square feet, the Hartford Business Journal reported, along with a third company, XingImaging LLC, that will lease three floors for its headquarters and research labs.

Developer Hurley Group, which initiated the conversion of the 8-story ex-office building in 2021, did not return a request for comment.

The conversion was designed by New Haven architecture firm Svigals + Partners, and includes roughly 12,000-square-foot floorplates intended for early- and mid-stage biotechs.

“We aim to make Elm City Bioscience Center a community for fast-growing companies graduating out of the area’s incubators and other smaller spaces; and these two companies are a great start,” Hurley Group president David Goldblum said in a statement when the renovations were unveiled in early 2023.

The new leases at 55 Church St. coincide with other recent biotech leases elsewhere in New Haven as the city’s life science cluster keeps expanding despite a national shortage of investment capital as investors pull back amid higher interest rates.

According to data compiled by brokerage Cushman & Wakefield, New Haven’s lab vacancy rate was 4 percent at the end of 2023 and the current building inventory totals approximately 1.5 million square feet. Average asking rents are $52 per square foot on a triple-net basis.