0 Boston Commercial Real Estate Retrospective

Posted on April 13, 2015 by Wil Catlin

Boston office buildings line the skyline

Credit: The Boston Globe

The city of Boston that is home to a wide variety of college, universities, professional sports team, hospitals and companies is changing. We have created the Back Bay, built office tower and now adding more buildings to our skyline. No longer are the tower views home to companies, but residences.

The Boston Globe has put together a retrospective, “A new age for an old town”, tracing the Hub’s commercial transformation. The article notes the following:

Today, Boston Properties, one of the city’s most prolific builders, is developing a 17-story office building on the final parcel within the Prudential complex. Meanwhile, the area around the Pru is exploding with new projects and proposals for hotels and towering residential buildings.

“It’s absolutely extraordinary,” said Bob Richards, a partner at Transwestern RBJ. “What’s driving it is the top-tier labor talent in industries like technology and life sciences. The young people who work for those companies want to live in an urban environment.”

Not coincidentally, the city’s population is rising more rapidly than it has in decades. The total head count rose by nearly 30,000 people, to about 646,000, between 2010 and 2013, according to the US Census Bureau. That’s more population growth in three years than Boston experienced in the 1980s and ’90s combined.

0 New Greenline Stops Bode Well for Cambridge Real Estate

Posted on February 11, 2015 by Wil Catlin

Credit: Bostinno.Streetwise.co

The city of Boston is growing its daytime and nighttime population and with that comes infrastructure, who steps in? The T. Well yes, it has been discussed for years, but the Greenline is adding six stops in Cambridge, Somerville and Medford. While some might argue that the Greenline is slow and clunky, yes it’s the old subway in the country, is still performs. By adding these stops commuters will gain affordable timely access to the city.

Bostinno.Streetwise notes the MBTA’s Green Line Extension project or GLX, calls for “a total of six new Green Line stops added in Cambridge, Somerville and Medford, as well as the relocation of the existing Lechmere Station. One of those planned stops is Union Square – a location which is due to receive its own billion dollar makeover.”

For more info on the GLX, jump over to Bostinno.Streetwise.

0 Kendall Square Office Rents Reach Record Level

Posted on January 19, 2015 by Wil Catlin

Four Cambridge Center

With the boost of office rents in East Cambridge, Downtown Crossing has become the new hotbed for Redline creative and tech companies with Class B rents still in the $30’s PSF.

The Boston Globe is reporting “Office rents in Kendall Square have hit an all-time high of almost $67 per square foot, breaking a record last set in 2001, according to the real estate brokerage Transwestern RBJ…Transwestern said the average asking rent on a top-tier office space in East Cambridge set a new record of $66.63 in the final quarter of 2014, edging out the previous record of $65.85 set in 2001. East Cambridge’s vacancy rate of 6.7 percent was lower than many parts of Boston’s central business district, but higher than those of the smaller office markets of South Station, North Station, and Longwood, whose vacancy rates ranged from 2 to 4.4 percent.”

Additional insight on the East Cambridge boom is available on the Boston Globe.

Office availability and neighborhood information for Downtown Crossing and Kendall Square are available on the following submarket pages:
Downtown Crossing offices
Kendall Square office space

0 New ‘state of the art’ Juice and Coffee Bar coming to Kendall Square?

Posted on January 9, 2015 by Wil Catlin

Looking for a fresh new twist in Kendall? Boston.eater.com posted an article on a mysterious “Craigslist job posting for a manager of a ‘brand new state of the art juice and coffee bar,’ that offered no name, location, or opening timeline…the posting suggests a focus on ‘all natural and organic’ ingredients sourced locally.”

inside Kendall square juice bar, Mother juice

Mother Juice in Kendall, courtesy of eater.com

In the meantime, visit Mother Juice @ 625 W Kendall Street, Cambridge.

0 Office Design Mirrors Culture, Approach for Modern Start-ups

Posted on January 7, 2015 by Wil Catlin

Art in Facebook's Cambridge office space

Credit: The Boston Globe

What type of art does your office have? The experience of today’s office differs greatly from what we saw just 10 years ago; today it exudes the company’s culture and vibe.

The Boston Globe recently published an article on the interior aesthetic and art marking Facebook’s Cambridge office:

The Kendall Square office of Facebook, which opened last year, includes five art pieces commissioned by the social media giant. Ryan Mack, who runs the local office for Facebook, oversaw the selection of art:

‘If you look at any of our offices, art’s an important part of our company culture. We try to find pieces that combine Facebook culture, which is about technology and connecting people, with the local culture. So we always get stuff from local artists…there are design elements that are consistent across all Facebook offices, but the art gives them a local touch. We put an artist statement up near each piece that tells a little story about the artist or how they designed that piece for the office.’

0 Cambridge Innovation Center at 15 Years Old

Posted on December 18, 2014 by Wil Catlin

Credit: Boston.About.com

Creating a community for innovators to innovate might be one of the most valuable innovations in Boston. Yes, the deals that are brought to market through CIC are what the VC’s are looking for, but without Tom Rowe’s platform — the Cambridge Innovation Center — some of these ideas may have been kept on the shelf and not made it to market.

A Boston Globe article offers some insight on CIC’s direction for the future:

“In April, [founder, Tim Rowe] opened the CIC Boston, a 60,000-square-foot shared office space downtown, and it has been just a few weeks since he opened CIC St. Louis, his first out-of-state venture and the largest startup space that is not on the East or West coast. Rowe was keen to cozy up to the Midwestern city’s startup scene: He saw promise in Washington University’s health care colossus and was tickled when Boeing opened offices in the 120,000-square-foot space — one of its first occupants. Lately, he has been shuttling to and from the Netherlands as he looks to take CIC global.”

Additional details and photos from the CIC’s 15th anniversary, are available on the Globe’s website.

0 Facebook’s Cambridge Office Space Hits One-Year Mark

Posted on November 12, 2014 by Wil Catlin

Credit: Facebook

So you have just been funded and you are in the hunt for the perfect office to grow the team. Have a look at the new digs for Facebook in Cambridge for some ideas.

Ryan Mack, the site lead for Facebook Boston notes in a blog post, “we look forward to hosting some of these events at the Facebook office, where we have a newly expanded space to support our growing engineering team. In the coming year we’ll continue hiring experienced engineers for our Boston team to work on data infrastructure, core systems services, location, and language runtimes, as well as new grads.”

You can also check out photos of Facebook’s office space in Cambridge on its site.

0 Boston Office Market is Positioned for Continued Growth

Posted on November 10, 2014 by Wil Catlin

The Boston office and retail market is expected to continue its upward march.

Credit: multihousingnews.com

According to an editorial on MultiHousingNews.com, “developers completed approximately 4.2 million square feet of office space over the last 12 months as compared to merely 1.4 million square feet in the previous year. Around 5.2 million square feet currently under construction in the metro area is expected to come online throughout 2016. According to Marcus & Millichap, approximately 3.2 million square feet of office space is set for completion by the end of 2014—a 1 percent increase from 2013—with new inventory being heavily concentrated in the Boston/Suffolk County and Route 128 North submarkets.”

For a detailed indicator of the Boston office market direction, jump over to the MultiHousingNews website.

0 How to Price Out your New Office Space

Posted on November 6, 2014 by Wil Catlin

So, you have just secured your next round of funding and you are off to the races. As part of your upcoming spend, you need to get an office that exudes the culture of your vision while being easily accessible for your growing team. You find it and your new headquarters will be in the heart of Downtown Crossing, DTX. What’s next, what are the associated costs?

Figure the space is 3,600 rentable square feet with 25 workstations.

Office space is quoted per square foot per annum, but P & L’s are not. The following breaks down the all the various expenses based 5 years of occupancy.

0 Collaborative Office Space Trending in Cambridge

Posted on October 23, 2014 by Wil Catlin

Bring the walls down and let’s see and hear each other. That is the new norm is office space, gone are the vast array of private offices. Today’s office layout is vastly different than just 10 years ago; today’s employees can expect to work in a benching platform, sitting very close to their coworkers. Their work station would have very little is any actual storage space and in some case may not even have land line if the role of that person is non customer related. The big delta is common space, this looks more like a large family room.

Credit: Boston.com

In an interview with Boston.com, Swedish architect, Gert Wingårdh, said “his [newest] design is aimed at improving company communications, a problem many businesses identify with. ‘Usually our surveys tell us that communications is lacking all over the world,’ said Wingårdh. ‘When employees have the same space to share, it enhances their sense of one another.’ With no walls between workstations, Wingårdh says employees will become aware of each other. At EF, even the CEO works in an open workstation.”