Mayor Wu Aims To Build 3,000 New Public Housing Units, Boston’s First In Decades

Berkeley Partners has acquired three industrial buildings in Marlborough for $30.2M as the industrial market remains hot in the Boston suburbs.  The California-based investor bought the properties at 19, 41 and 53 Brigham St., known as Brigham Business Park, from an entity linked to Stockbridge Real Estate, according to property records.…

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The still-growing life sciences real estate market is facing an increasingly common and costly threat to property of all kinds: natural disasters.

And since many of the core markets for life sciences in the nation are on the coasts, these properties will specifically deal with challenges related to intensifying rainfall, sea level rise and flooding due to the impacts of climate change.

Rising waters likely translate to rising costs. 

Forecasts for increased climate risk, which vary wildly and may be conservative as the globe warms faster than expected, are pushing developers to invest more heavily in resiliency, increasing costs for new lab space and requiring retrofits for existing facilities, as they pursue development in already-established coastal hubs. 

These added costs, along with considerations like pricier insurance policies, come on top of the usually more complex and expensive development process required to construct a lab than a typical office or industrial property.

“Parts of Boston really are uniquely vulnerable to coastal flooding, both inundation and stormwater and precipitation,” said Kate Dineen, president and CEO of A Better City, a nonprofit focused on sustainability and the built environment in the Boston region. “The risks are really quite striking. There are some neighborhoods that…

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In Case You Missed It...

All eyes are on the Federal Reserve as commercial real estate deal-makers flocked to Miami Beach this week. 

Following an 18-month period during which rising interest rates punished deal volume to the point that most major brokerage firms implemented layoffs, real estate investors are restlessly awaiting interest rate cuts that they expect to unlock capital just as lenders become more aggressive with distressed borrowers.

This dynamic will boost acquisitions and force sales at discounts, industry players told Bisnow at the Commercial Real Estate Finance Council's biannual conference on Monday. 

“The fence-sitting that's been going on between lenders and borrowers is going to come to an end in 2024,” said Tad O'Connor, co-chair of real estate litigation practice at New York-based Kasowitz Benson Torres. “You're going to see more contentious resolutions of things than what has been happening really since…

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