Mark Alden Branch,
Yale buys a second campus,
Yale Alumni Magazine, July/August 2007, pp. 12-13, archives.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/2007_07/l_v.html 

The Yale campus is about to get 43 percent bigger. The university announced in June that it will buy a 136-acre research campus in West Haven, Connecticut, that is being vacated by Bayer Healthcare. The purchase will give Yale 550,000 square feet of new laboratory space, allowing for an unexpectedly rapid expansion of Yale's biomedical research initiatives. . . .

Although Bayer and the university will not reveal the purchase price until the closing, later in the summer, people familiar with the deal told the Associated Press that the price was about $100 million. [Yale president Richard] Levin says Yale was the highest of 15 bidders for the property, largely because the university was the only bidder interested in using the state-of-the-art research laboratory space. (The others were real estate developers who would have converted the lab space to offices or replaced the buildings with big-box retail.) Building comparable lab space from scratch, Levin says, would cost about $350 million.

* * *

From the Chronicle of Higher Education "Buildings & Grounds Blog," April 22, 2008,
chronicle.com/blogPost/Yale-s-Decision-to-Buy-Bayer/5125

Yale University's decision last year to buy a 137-acre laboratory complex constructed over four decades by Bayer HealthCare came together "almost in a matter of days," according to an engaging account in today's Yale Daily News. Yale paid just $109-million for the complex, a price that works out to $73 per square foot for state-of-the-art facilities that would have cost $650 to $700 per square foot if the university were to start from scratch in downtown New Haven, Conn. . . .

But the parties that sought to buy the complex turned out to be developers eager to tear down the labs and replace them with big-box stores, or to turn the labs into offices. Bayer officials, who couldn't bear to see that happen, were interested in Yale's offer. Nevertheless, Yale kept quiet about its interest, since the property was being sold at auction. The university won the prize after three rounds of bidding—and paid cash.

* * *

QUESTION:  ASSUME THAT THE NEXT HIGHEST BID AFTER YALE'S WAS $80 MILLION.  WHAT WAS THE "BARGAINING RANGE" THAT YALE AND BAYER WERE WORKING WITHIN?