Boston Tower Gets New Owner in $482M Deal

One Marina Park Drive. Image courtesy of JLL

In a $482 million deal, an affiliate of Clarion Partners LLC has purchased One Marina Park Drive, a 491,573-square-foot Class A office tower with street-level retail space in Boston. JLL represented the seller, a joint venture of The Fallon Co. and Barings. The 18-story property is part of Fan Pier, The Fallon Co.’s 9-acre, 3-million-square-foot mixed-use development in the city’s Seaport District.

The property is 100 percent leased. Tenants include intellectual property law firm Fish & Richardson, Enel X, Intarcia Therapeutics, Gunderson Dettmer, Battery Ventures and Polaris Ventures. Designed by Elkus Manfredi, One Marina Park Drive was completed in 2010 and is LEED Gold certified.

READ ALSO: The Story of Fan Pier, a Catalyst for Boston’s Waterfront

In a prepared statement, JLL noted that the property combines “strong cash flow, near-term upside and long-term capital appreciation.” JLL’s Capital Markets team representing the seller was led by Coleman Benedict, Matthew Sherry, Kerry Hawkins and Ben Sayles.

In 2005, a joint venture of Fallon and Mass Mutual Financial Group purchased the land for what became Fan Pier, but which was then mostly made up of abandoned parking lots. Other office buildings in Fan Pier include 11 Fan Pier Blvd., 50 Northern Ave. and 100 Northern Ave. The latter was purchased by Deutsche Bank in 2016, and the other two were acquired in 2014 by Senior Housing Property Trust, in a $1.1 billion deal that was one of Boston’s largest that year.

Tight market

Boston’s longstanding economic base of education, technology and life sciences continues to push office availability ever tighter and rents ever higher, according to a third-quarter report from Lincoln Property Co. Another factor is the even tighter vacancy situation in Cambridge, which LPC notes is driving some life sciences tenants into Boston proper.

The Seaport submarket’s direct vacancy is a shade under 4 percent, and asking rents there average $61.6 per square foot, the LPC report shows. One of Seaport’s most significant recent leases occurred when Foundation Medicine took all 580,000 square feet at WS Development’s 400 Summer St.