This Week's Boston Deal Sheet
Harvard Business School Publishing is relocating into nearly 125k SF adjacent to Boston Landing, New Balance’s 1.76M SF mixed-use project that’s raising the profile of Brighton from an outlier to a central location.
HBS Publishing will leave Watertown to be the new anchor tenant at 20 Guest St next to the massive new complex that will include: a new HQ for New Balance, the official practice facility for the Boston Bruins, 80k SF of retail, a 175-room boutique hotel, housing, and a sports arena for track and field. NB Development Group may also build another 450k SF of offices.
Later this year, New Balance will leave 20 Guest St—a 10-story, 229k SF Class-A office building—to move into its new complex, now under construction. Boston Landing will join its Allston neighbors—TCB’s New Residences at Charlesview and Samuels’ Continuum—to reshape Brighton from an industrial/student enclave into a new downtown submarket. In the HBS deal, Transwestern | RBJ’s Steve Purpura and Danielle DeMarco repped the landlord, NB Development, and JLL’s John Osten and Molly Heath repped HBS Publishing.
SALES
Equity Residential of Chicago, through an affiliate, paid Portland, OR-based Gerding Edlen $130M for 319 A St in Fort Point at the waterfront. The 20-story luxury building overlooking the Channel, which has 202 apartments, was designed by ADD Inc now with Stantec. The project included 27 units of “innovation housing” in a renovated building at nearby 63 Melcher St. Three years ago when construction started, CEO Mark Edlen said he liked the site for its "walkability" before the term was popular.
LEASING
Euro clothier Primark is taking 73k SF at the Burlington Mall and 71k SF at South Shore Plaza in Braintree. In 2014, the landlord, Sears Holdings, reached a lease agreement with Primark for seven stand-alone stores in the Northeast and these are the last two locations. Sears will still have presence in the malls as it strategically refashions its real estate portfolio.
***
128 Technology is moving to another building in its hometown of Burlington—200 Wheeler Rd—where it’s taking nearly 27k SF. DTZ’s Mike Dalton, Mike O’Leary and Blake Baldwin repped landlord Gutierrez, and Jumbo Capital’s Brad Spenser repped the tenant.
***
In rival suburban market Waltham, Hobbs Brook Management has signed leases with: Panther Global Group (repped by Lincoln Property), for 6,013 SF; and MarketCast (repped by CBRE) for 3,604 RSF at 225 Wyman St. Konica Minolta is taking 20k SF and Entrust Datacard leased 4,437 SF at 404 Wyman St, both repped by Cushman & Wakefield.
***
In Wakefield, Hobbs Brook has leased 13k SF to Lantos Technologies (repped by JLL) and 3,349 SF to CPower (repped by the Stevens Group), both at 201 Edgewater Dr; and 2,563 SF to OSF|Global Services (repped by Wyman Street Advisors) at 500 Edgewater Dr.
CONSTRUCTION & DEVELOPMENT
Seefried Industrial Properties is building a 250k SF warehouse distribution center for Victory Packaging in Bellingham near the intersection of High and Maple streets, near Route 495. Campanelli Construction is the GC. Avison Young’s Todd Mason, Jeff Lindenberger, Andrea Gardner and Kevin Malloy repped Victory and Seefried in the land acquisition. Parsons Commercial Group’s Andrew Sacher repped the seller.
ASSIGNMENTS
Acella Construction has been chosen as construction manager for the $2.5M renovation and restoration of Old Derby Academy and Hingham Heritage Museum. They'll renovate the early 19th century building to make it a climate-controlled, museum-quality exhibition and programming facility and build a 4,600 SF addition.
***
Harvard Business School has selected Walsh Brothers as construction manager for its new, 1,000-seat Klarman Hall on the HBS campus. It will feature meeting facilities with state-of-the-art technology for events and meetings of scholars and business leaders from around the world.
PEOPLE
In an effort to revive Boston’s faltering bid for the 2024 Summer Olympics, Mayor Walsh is redoubling his leadership by establishing the Office of Olympic Planning and he's appointed Sara Myerson to lead it. The office will develop the city’s plans and policies as a potential host city with the cost to run the office being paid by Boston 2024, the private group promoting the bid. Most recently, Sara, 31, was Chief of Staff at Preservation of Affordable Housing, the owner and operator of nearly 8,500 affordable rental homes throughout the country.
BY THE NUMBERS
Downtown office tenants, prepare for a 30% rise in rents over the next three years, the steepest increase in the country, according to Cushman & Wakefield’s new US office market overview and three-year forecast report. The limited supply of quality offices will push rents up and the vacancy rate down from 9.4% today to 7.9% in 2017. It’s official: tech tenants are the hot new item downtown. They accounted for 28% of all new leases in the CBD in 2014.
