Suburban Boston Office Building To Be Auctioned Off After Losing Anchor Tenant
A Class-B office building in Quincy is heading to auction in the coming week, another troubling sign for the weakening Boston-area office market.
The seven-story, 119K SF building at 400 Crown Colony Drive is scheduled for an online auction on Monday with a starting bid of $2.5M, according to a Ten-X listing.
The building is the former headquarters of the Patriot Ledger newspaper and is 43% occupied, the Banker & Tradesman first reported. The daily newspaper took up 50% of the leased space within the building until its move in 2018 to 2 Adams Place, B&T reported.
The building, which was developed in 1987, was sold by CW Capital to UBS for $18M in 2005. Land records don't show the property changing ownership in the years since.
The listing hints that the building could be prime for an office-to-lab conversion due to its proximity to major life sciences clusters and public transportation.
The property is part of the 1.5M SF Crown Colony Office Park that Flatley Co. developed, and it is next door to the Quincy Adams Red Line stop. The park includes the Marriott Boston Quincy Hotel, a Bright Horizons daycare center and an apartment complex.
As macroeconomic pressures in the market persist, the Quincy office building isn't the only property to go up for auction this week.
A former Best Western hotel in Boston was scheduled to be auctioned off Thursday following a foreclosure. The 68-room motel and adjacent 6 Egremont Road are assessed at $10.6M, the Boston Business Journal reported.
The hotel was intended to become a 151-unit condo building after a proposal from developer John Matheson was approved by the Boston Planning & Development Agency in 2018.
