This Week’s Boston Deal Sheet
MassHousing is providing $205M to Providence Realty Investment LLC for the refinancing and preservation of 10 affordable housing communities totaling 931 apartments in the Greater Boston area, the agency announced Monday.
The 10 communities receiving the financing are located in Abington, Falmouth, Maynard, Needham, Norton, Reading, Sudbury, Sturbridge, Wellesley and Winchester. The housing is designated for lower-income senior citizens and families.
The financing will be used to maintain the affordability of these apartments through MassHousing’s Multifamily Accelerated Processing/Ginnie Mae joint venture initiative. This initiative offers loans to owners of rental properties through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
The communities previously received financing from MassHousing in 2011. The financing helped ensure that one-third of the apartments weren't converted into market-rate housing and would stay affordable for tenants.
LEASES
Korro Bio Inc., a gene editing startup, signed a 50K SF lease at 60 First St. in Cambridge. The building, formerly a Sears department store, is part of a larger redevelopment of the CambridgeSide Galleria Mall, according to the Boston Business Journal. Anchor Line Partners and Northwood Investors are redeveloping the building, and the partnership in December signed Prime Medicine to a 149K SF lease. The latest deal brings the building to fully leased.
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The Broad Institute, a research center headquartered in Cambridge, leased 146K SF of lab, research and development, and office space at 27 Network Drive in Burlington. Developer Nordblom Co. is developing the property with $200M to create a 270K SF building, the Boston Globe reported. It is part of a larger campus that in February landed a 125K SF deal with biotech company Vericel.
Atlanta-based developer Jamestown and Related Beal signed nine new tenants for 260K SF at the redevelopment of the Innovation and Design building in the Seaport. The building was originally constructed in 1918, and Jamestown purchased it in 2013 and launched a partnership with Related Beal in 2020 to turn it into 1.4M SF of lab space.
FINANCING
Developer Babak Veyssi of Legend Development Group secured a $16M refinancing deal from First Republic Bank for a new multifamily building in Allston branded as Peridot. The building, consisting of 32 units at 398 Cambridge St., was originally planned as for-sale condos, but Veyssi told Bisnow he has switched the majority of the units to rental apartments. The building completed construction in June, and he said he has now leased up 28 of the units as apartments, while the other four will remain affordable for-sale units that will be sold through a city program, Veyssi said.
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JLL Capital Markets arranged a $193.7M construction loan for Marcus Partners, provided by Citizens, for the development of a life sciences campus on two parcels in the Raymond L. Flynn Marine Park in the Seaport. The 263K SF development is expected to deliver in 2024, and it is fully pre-leased to Ginkgo Bioworks, according to Boston Real Estate Times.
SALES
The Hilton Garden Inn hotel in Burlington traded hands from Florida-based Chatham Lodging Trust to Chicago-based Arbor Lodging Group for an undisclosed price, the companies announced. The 180-room hotel sits directly across Route 128 from the Burlington Mall. The hotel, built in 1975, appears to have suffered greatly during the pandemic, as its revenue per available room fell from $110 in 2019 to $31 in 2021, according to Chatham. It was part of a four-property portfolio Chatham sold for $80M as part of an effort to “recycle capital out of older assets into newer hotels with higher growth prospects,” Chatham CEO Jeffrey Fisher said in a release.
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Newmark brokered the sales of two retail shopping centers in Cape Cod totaling over $120M, both sold by O’Connor Capital Partners. The company sold the 258K SF Southwind Plaza property in Hyannis to Bandera Ventures, and it sold the 280K SF Falmouth Landing property in Falmouth to TA Realty. Newmark's Geoffrey Millerd, Jonathan Martin, Paul Penman, Mathew Adler and Casey O’Brien worked on the deal.
THIS AND THAT
WS Development proposed adding more lab and office space that would ultimately cut down on residential, retail and hotel use in the last undeveloped sites in the Seaport, the Boston Business Journal reported. The proposed changes would alter the uses of four separate buildings, reducing the amount of planned residential space by 472K SF and adding 900K SF of lab and office space compared to the previous plan.
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Callahan Construction Managers completed its multifamily project Anden, a 106K SF building with 87 units. The project, which is in Weymouth Landing, was developed by WEYLEX LLC and designed by Cube3. The project broke ground in October 2020 and began moving in residents April 1.
