Continuing the remarkable turnaround of one of the country’s worst environmental nightmares, National Development is pushing ahead with another Class A office building at its MetroNorth Corporate Center in Woburn. To be known as 150 MetroNorth Drive, the 140,000-square-foot structure is slated for completion next August.
Although Insignia/ESG has just begun marketing the speculative project, broker Stephen J. Murphy told Banker & Tradesman last week that the real estate company is already seeing “great activity” for the building from a range of prospective tenants. Asking rents are in the mid-$30 per-square-foot range, he said, reflecting the strong growth seen in the Woburn area during the past three years.
“The whole region is maturing,” said Murphy, noting that rents were in the low $20s per square foot when Insignia/ESG first began marketing space in other MetroNorth buildings nearly two years ago. The most recent coup occurred in early October when Lois Paul & Partners agreed to lease 90,000 square feet in another building at the 265-acre complex, a 145,000-square-foot property that Insignia/ESG also is marketing. That deal is also said to be above the $30 per-square-foot threshold.
Interestingly, Lois Paul will be migrating from nearby Burlington, a more established office market which is currently achieving rents between $3 and $5 per square foot, according to National Development President Thomas Alperin. The developer, who spoke about the project at a recent luncheon sponsored by the New England Women In Real Estate, nonetheless said he believes Woburn is beginning to catch up as a business destination, maintaining that “the Burlington/Woburn syndrome will gradually fade.”
Alperin joined officials from the Greenfield Environmental Trust Group at the program to discuss the efforts taken to reclaim contaminated property that once ranked No. 5 on the Environmental Protection Agency’s National Priorities List (aka Superfund sites). GETG principal Cynthia Brooks detailed the years of work it took with the community, environmental officials and developers to reposition the contaminated land into a commercially viable development.
During her remarks, Brooks noted that the national scandal which arose from the property was difficult to overcome at first, with Woburn viewed as “the place where you don’t drink the water, or you glow in the dark if you do.”
“The Industri-plex site is a rare Superfund success story,” said Brooks, who estimated the complex will yield more than 12,000 jobs by 2010. Fueling up to $4 million in new annual tax revenue is a diverse range of uses, from 200,000 square feet of retail space anchored by a Target Department Store to a 150-room hotel, 2,400-vehicle intermodal commuter rail station and what will eventually be 1.3 million square feet of office space.
In: Genuity
During his presentation, Alperin agreed it was a difficult task at first to reposition the development, joking that “I cringe when I hear Cynthia keep calling it” the Industri-plex Superfund site. “That’s not exactly something you want to go in and tell your board of directors,” he added about the property’s infamous history.
Despite those hurdles, the ability to adequately remediate the land has allowed Newton-based National Development to successfully lure such tenants as ArQule, Paychex and – perhaps most importantly – Genuity to MetroNorth has made it a proven destination. Genuity, the former GET Internetworking, will eventually have more than 3,600 people working at the property. Fleet Bank’s willingness to finance the project also was a major boost, said Alperin. He also cited National’s Bryan Clancy for heading up the redevelopment effort, as well as Vanasse Hangen Brustlin on transportation consulting and Riemer & Braunstein for its legal advice.
“We do view this as a development success story,” said Alperin, adding that a good piece of the upside was the ability to buy 30 acres of previously isolated land for $2.65 million. That provided National with the margin it needed to make MetroNorth doable, he said.
At this point, Murphy said he believes the existing space in the building already under construction and that available at 150 MetroNorth Drive will lease up quickly. The Woburn market currently has a vacancy rate of 9 percent, he said, and the project is poised to benefit as companies are squeezed outward from Boston and Cambridge, where rents are skyrocketing past $70 per square foot and increasingly even past $80 per square foot.
In the meantime, the restoration of the property just received more accolades when GETG and the site team received the National Phoenix Award for New England for brownfields excellence from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Along with the Woburn Redevelopment Authority, Brooks and several other principals from Cambridge-based GETG were on hand to receive the award from the EPA.
