0 Tech Companies Gravitate Back to Cities

Where do venture-backed companies focus when coming to the 617 area code? Unsurprisingly, the list focuses on the city core with areas like the Seaport, Financial District, Back Bay, Kendall Square and some clustered at the 90/95 interchange.

map of office space in Boston and Cambridge

Credit: City Lab

Here’s a national perspective from City Lab:

While many large, high-tech companies like Facebook, Google, Apple, and Microsoft have their main campuses in suburban areas, cities and urban areas house the majority of venture capital–backed startups. My own research estimates that 55 percent of all venture capital investment now flows to urban neighborhoods. In the Bay Area and Boston–Cambridge, more than 60 percent of venture capital investment gravitates to these neighborhoods.

Additional information is available on CityLab’s website.

0 Kendall Square Office Rents Reach Record Level

4 Cambridge Center

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 Apple Leases Additional Office Space in Cambridge

One Broadway east Cambridge

One Broadway in Cambridge MA

Apple is expanding Siri in Cambridge by securing 11,500 RSF at One Broadway.

According to an article on CultofMac.com, “documents filed with local authorities show that the company has leased around 11,500 square feet of office space on the 13th floor of One Broadway, an office tower owned by MIT and located on the outer perimeter of the university’s campus in Cambridge, MA,” in an effort to expand its Siri team.

You can read the entire article the CultofMac website.

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

Facebook office space in Kendall Square

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 Kendall Square Office and Lab Space in High Demand

office space on binney street in east cambridge

Credit: BBJ

East Cambridge is host to some of the best know pharma and tech companies.  Lab space has become a very limited commodity and Amgen is in the hunt for 150k RSF.  According to CoStar the lab vacancy rate among the 17 buildings is 7.1 percent on a direct basis or 17.3 percent including sublets.

The BBJ puts the competitive Kendall Square real estate market in perspective:

The East Cambridge office and research market includes only 6.4 million square feet — meaning…three deals alone could lock up about 10 percent of the neighborhood’s entire inventory when all is said and done. The activity, along with strong leasing among major information-technology players, is fueling a pricing surge in East Cambridge that has seen average annual rents surpass $58 per square foot, by far the highest in the region and among the highest for any neighborhood in the country, according to market data provided by Cassidy Turley in Boston.

The full article is available on the Boston Business Journal, here.