Sasaki Moving HQ To 120-Year-Old Downtown Boston Building
Sasaki has found a Boston home, signing a 16-year lease for the majority of space at an office building near the Chinatown T stop.
MC Real Estate Partners purchased the largely vacant 76K SF 110 Chauncy St. for $27.8M this month, and signed Sasaki to occupy 64K SF in the top seven floors of the eight-story building, MCRE announced Monday.
The Watertown-based design firm will lead the redesign of 110 Chauncy, which was built in the late 1890s, into a modern office that is expected to house approximately 250 Sasaki employees by early 2022, according to a statement.
“We jumped at the chance to partner with MCRE on pioneering a sensitive, sustainable, and flexible recasting of historic 110 Chauncy as a model for the future of workplace design in Boston and beyond,” Sasaki Workplace Design Principal Liz von Goeler said in the statement.
The acquisition was announced in partnership with a private capital partner, and Suffolk County records indicate a new mortgage for the address with Berkshire Bank. The seller of 110 Chauncy St., Chauncy Property Holdings LLC, is tied to the operators of the Buckminster Hotel in Boston’s Fenway neighborhood and didn't respond to a request for comment Monday.
The financial terms of Sasaki's lease were undisclosed, and a spokesman for MCRE did not immediately return a request for more information. Asking rents for CBD assets sat at $64.85 per SF at the end of 2020, Newmark reported.
The deal comes one month after Sasaki announced the sale of its 97K SF Watertown office for $23M to Berkeley Investments, which will pursue a life sciences conversion.
Sasaki will remain involved in the redesign of its old Watertown building, led by SGA, and will lead the design of its new downtown HQ, with improvements at 110 Chauncy including enhanced HVAC systems, bicycle storage and showers for commuters, and office space on the first and basement floors.
MCRE's portfolio spans New York City, Washington, D.C., and Boston, where it also owns the 72K SF 201-207 South St. in the Leather District and 485 Massachusetts Ave., a 41K SF building in Cambridge’s Central Square.
Sasaki's lease represents one of the market’s largest deals this year after a difficult 2020 marked by record negative absorption and sublease availability. Sasaki’s lease trails in size only Amazon's massive 630K SF commitment in January to a new office building by WS Development in the Seaport.
