Investment Case · USC RED 469 Field Project · Spring 2026
An independent redevelopment case for a shuttered pharma campus south of Paris.
Sanofi vacated its 16.2-hectare R&D campus south of Paris in 2024. The sponsor’s filed plan keeps the labs and swaps offices for industrial flex. Cité Vivante is the independent counter-case: exit the impaired office, retain the irreplaceable wet-lab platform, and add the neighbourhood the campus never had. The case rests on a week of primary research in Paris and a market database where every figure carries its source.
01 The Situation
Sanofi announced the closure of its Chilly-Mazarin research campus in June 2022, vacated it by late 2024, and auctioned more than 400 lots of laboratory equipment in September 2025. What remains, nineteen kilometres south of Paris, is roughly 32,000 m² of wet-lab and vivarium infrastructure that is hard to reproduce, plus about 50,000 m² of suburban office the Île-de-France market no longer wants.
Arizona Asset Management acquired the site and filed Boost Campus: an industry-and-innovation programme that keeps the lab platform and replaces the offices with industrial flex. It is a rational plan for the asset. It leaves the place unresolved: no housing, no daily-life retail, and street life that stops at the fence line, on a parcel inside the 800-metre catchment of two tram-train stations in France’s densest research corridor.
Cité Vivante asks the higher-and-better-use question, and answers it with market evidence rather than design preference.
02 The Site
Behind one fence line the campus is a single operating asset. On title it is seven cadastral parcels straddling the Chilly-Mazarin / Longjumeau boundary, which is why the entitlement runs on two tracks, and why the programme sorts the way it does. Three parcels carry the deal; four carry infrastructure.
Parcel schedule7 parcels · 2 communes
Chilly-Mazarin Longjumeau
AC 705 (6.3 ha in Chilly-Mazarin) is the residential play. AC 600 holds the BSL-2 platform that cannot be reproduced. AC 092 anchors mixed-use frontage on the transit corridor. The remaining four are servitudes, rail frontage and lab support.
Source: parcel geometry digitised from cadastre.gouv.fr; areas cross-checked against DRIEAT dossier F01125P0115.
Every geometry in the case, explorable. The same GeoJSON behind the exhibits, rendered as a six-layer Leaflet application I built for the field project: high-level zoning, the detailed PLU code mosaic, the Chilly-Mazarin / Longjumeau boundary, all seven cadastral parcels, on-site building footprints and the T12 · RER C · Métro 18 transit corridor. Parcels were digitised from cadastre.gouv.fr; buildings and rail geometry queried from OpenStreetMap through the Overpass API; Métro 18 is plotted through its ten future stations. Click any parcel, building or zone for its ID, surface and status.
03 The Market Thesis
Each pillar below follows from the market evidence and pairs with its exhibit.
Pillar 1
Demolish ~50,000 m² of obsolete office rather than refurbish it speculatively. Greater Paris Q1 2026: take-up down 15% year-on-year, immediate supply up 9% to 6.33M m², average incentives at 30.4%. The inner southern suburbs ran 15.9% vacancy against a 17.9% ten-year high.
→ Exhibit 02 · office scissors
Pillar 2
Keep and re-lease 32,000 m² of BSL-2 wet lab and the vivarium as the Phase-1 income anchor, gated on an anchor-tenant LOI with only 5,000 m² of speculative new lab, because Île-de-France supply is growing from ~108,000 m² toward ~250,000 m² by late 2026.
→ Exhibit 03 · lab supply wave
Pillar 3
Introduce 350–500 homes (20–25% affordable), 3,000–5,000 m² of services and a 2–3 ha park. Chilly-Mazarin delivered ~32 net new homes a year from 2016–22, while Boost Campus alone returns 1,300–1,500 jobs; new-build apartments trade near €4,000/m².
→ Exhibit 04 · the supply gap
04 The Plan
A productive north edge and a residential south quarter
The physical strategy follows the underwriting. Retain the B9 laboratory spine and the vivarium; repurpose B3 into public-facing services; demolish the obsolete office crescent and the central surface parking field. Innovation and industry hold the north edge along the rail corridor, while homes, the park and daily services form a southern quarter around a central commons, with parking moved below grade.
| Component | Quantum | Disposition |
|---|---|---|
| Life-science labs | 32,000 m² | Retain and reposition: BSL-2 wet lab, CDMO/CRO tenancy |
| Legacy office | ~50,000 m² | Demolish; no speculative office added |
| Residential | 350–500 units | New build, 5–7 storeys; 20–25% affordable |
| Retail & services | 3,000–5,000 m² | Ground floor: café, pharmacy, crèche, grocery, co-working |
| Public park | 2–3 ha | Converted from ~53,000 m² of existing green space |
| Cultural facility | ~2,000 m² | Maison de quartier, conceived as a concession to the commune |
05 The Binding Constraint
The site’s industrial/activity zoning prohibits standalone housing outright. Nothing about the residential programme is possible without a land-use change, and the proposal treats that as its central risk rather than a footnote.
The pathway is a Déclaration de Projet with Mise en compatibilité du PLU, coordinated across two communes on an 18–30-month runway, with no residential construction triggered before rezoning is final.
Proof the mechanism works sits three kilometres away. At Découflé, Nexity Héritage ran the identical process on a former industrial site, and the consultation record also set the political ceiling: the original 500-unit concept was judged too dense and advanced at roughly 300. Cité Vivante is deliberately sized below the precedent, at 35–50 units per hectare.
06 Primary Research
March 15–21, 2026: the sponsor, capital markets, brokerage, municipal government and the regional agency, plus a site walkthrough with Arizona and a Paris typology tour with USC faculty.
SYNAPTICA · Boost Campus
Jean Marc Bourez · President, SYNAPTICA; Dir. Executive, Boost Campus
The sponsor’s One Health positioning, tenant-fit discipline, and a development-return framework of 18–20% target IRR at 50/50 debt-equity.
Eastdil Secured
Arnaud de Sordi · Managing Director, France
Capital-markets framing: suburban capital appetite, debt advisory backdrop, and how lenders read unsecured entitlements.
BNP Paribas Real Estate
Research session
European CRE investment at €177bn in 2025 (+9%), rate trajectory, and the Paris CBD (5.4%) versus secondary (10.9%) vacancy spread.
Chilly-Mazarin & Longjumeau
Municipal planning officials
Two-commune PLU coordination, governance conventions, and the local political context any rezoning must survive.
Paris-Saclay Agglomeration
Economic development office
Cluster priorities across six target sectors, student-housing pressure, and support for a public-facing business facility in B3.
Newmark & World Bank
David Bouita · Ellen Hamilton
Île-de-France industrial demand and comparable transactions; the suburban-redevelopment policy lens on campus conversions.
“A north-Paris office conversion absorbed €10–20M of structural reinforcement and then couldn’t find tenants. Wait for the right tenant; don’t spend conversion capital speculatively.”
07 The Method
In this deck, every figure traces to a source, and that check caught three errors before the committee saw them.
Eleven Paris meetings logged with dates, people and roles: the qualitative base for every assumption.
A 27-table Supabase/PostgreSQL database of INSEE, Sitadel, DVF, Immostat and broker data, every row carrying its source, pull date and a confidence rating.
Fifteen SVG charts render from warehouse queries rather than numbers retyped into slides, feeding the HTML/CSS deck and its PDF/PPTX exports.
A source-check workflow caught a vacancy figure attached to the wrong geography, stale prior-year rents presented as current, and a mislabelled rent row.
08 Honest Outcome
This is a field project. There are no realized results: no closed financing, no built square footage, no operating history. What it shows is the work that precedes those things. The investment case is defensible, the entitlement pathway is correctly identified against a live local precedent, the market evidence is verified, and the research infrastructure was built to survive scrutiny.
The Author
USC Price · Real Estate Development · KAT Development
Kyle led the investment case end to end: the market research and source verification, the entitlement and precedent analysis, the financial framework, and the investment-committee narrative. He also built the production system behind it: a 27-table Supabase market-data warehouse, a static HTML/CSS deck with source-linked SVG exhibits, and a Three.js massing model.
His individual RED 469 paper extended the thesis further, arguing a higher affordable-housing share and an extended-stay / VEFA-condominium expression of the residential programme serving the Paris-Saclay biotech cluster.
Happy to walk through the market thesis, the Découflé entitlement analysis, or the Supabase warehouse behind the fifteen exhibits. I am also happy to say what I would do differently next time.
Background: the campus reimagined at golden hour. Render study.