How McCord Beat Out 300 Proposals To Draw Eli Lilly To Houston

Eli Lilly’s $6.5B manufacturing investment at Generation Park has been a decade in the making.

Officials from McCord Development and Eli Lilly and Co., one of the world's largest pharmaceutical developers and manufacturers, began discussions in August 2023 about potentially placing a new facility in Northeast Houston, McCord General Counsel Shawn Cloonan said. 

But the deal came on the back of 12 years of massive infrastructure investment, a focus on workforce development and lessons learned from some major misses.

The groundwork of attracting large-scale biotech and life sciences companies to Generation Park began in 2013, the year McCord broke ground on the 4,300-acre master-planned development and initiated a relationship with San Jacinto College for an educational component.

The life sciences-focused efforts picked up in 2015, when President Ryan McCord’s father, Rick McCord, died a year after being diagnosed with cancer. Ryan McCord recognized the value of clinical research and trials and became interested in how Generation Park could support life sciences development in Houston, Cloonan said.

“We quickly identified the development and the manufacturing piece because of where Generation Park sits,” he said.

The site is close to the port and George Bush Intercontinental Airport and has an extensive network of utilities. 

Lilly chose Generation Park for its synthetic medicine active pharmaceutical product facility from a list of more than 300 proposals and applications. The company will develop the first oral GLP-1 weight-loss medication at the site, along with ingredients for other medicines.

Speed to market was a major deciding factor for the company, McCord Senior Director of Sales and Leasing John Flournoy said. Being outside of the city of Houston but in its extraterritorial jurisdiction, the permitting process is more straightforward, he said.

Lilly has heavy power and water requirements, so it was also attracted to the $250M worth of infrastructure investment at the site. 

“Our secret sauce at Generation Park is our infrastructure,” Flournoy said. 

Yet those assets weren’t enough to convince Amgen to bring its $550M biomanufacturing project to Generation Park. Despite being offered $110M worth of incentives, the biopharmaceutical company picked North Carolina in 2021. 

“They actually communicated with us after making their decision. … They said, ‘We need to see a curriculum on the ground that can train that workforce,’” Ryan McCord said. 

The day after learning of Amgen’s decision, McCord began working with the Ireland-based National Institute for Bioprocessing Research and Training. McCord’s relationship with San Jacinto College helped the two institutions partner on the Center for Biotechnology at Generation Park, which they broke ground on in early 2024. 

“Once we got [NIBRT] here and they saw the partners and the assets, it wasn’t that hard,” Cloonan said. 

McCord’s enticement of NIBRT to help train a workforce for the industry it wanted to attract shows the firm’s approach to real estate development. 

“I think it's pretty unique,” Cloonan said.

The Center for Biotechnology, which had its grand opening last month, helps ensure that Lilly and other life sciences operators will have the workforce they need to be successful in the Houston area. While Houston's number of life sciences jobs has surged from fewer than 15,000 in 2003 to more than 35,000 in 2024, according to CBRE, it still ranked 14th out of the nation's top 25 largest life sciences employment clusters in 2023.

Lilly’s project, for which McCord sold Lilly about 236 acres, is a market-validating transaction for the region, Cloonan said. It is also already attracting a trail of tagalong investment. 

Since the Lilly announcement, the active pipeline of projects at Generation Park exceeds $20B, Flournoy said.

He said an important factor in ensuring Generation Park remains an ideal home for Lilly and other biotech companies is maintaining relationships.

“It's not just the one-off land transaction where we ride off into the sunset after we transact on the land,” Flournoy said. “I think they also saw ... that their success and our success were directly linked.”