Image courtesy of CBT Architects and Pelli Clarke Pelli
Boston Properties will team up with a Canadian pension fund and the Singaporean sovereign wealth fund on a co-investment program that plans to buy $2 billion in office properties in Boston and five other U.S. metros through joint ventures.
The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and GIC are partnering with the Boston-based office REIT on the new investment program, which also will target acquisitions in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle and Washington, D.C.
GIC, which manages Singapore’s foreign reserves, will contribute $500 million in equity, while Boston Properties and the CPP will kick in $250 million apiece. The group targets a total acquisition pipeline of $2 billion using leverage.
Boston Properties said it will provide the two partners with exclusive first offers to form joint ventures on the new acquisitions, but not including ground up developments.
The group dismissed recent predictions that demand for office space could take a significant hit amid the widespread shift to hybrid workspace models in the pandemic.
“We firmly believe that top companies need collaborative workspaces to build culture, innovate and win the war for talent,” Adam Gallistel, managing director of Americas real estate for GIC, said in a statement.
A CBRE report released this week showed some signs of improvement for the local office market.
Vacancies in Boston remained flat at 11.9 percent in the second quarter, but sublease listings declined for the first time since December 2019. After declining to under 5 percent in mid-December, occupancy levels in office towers topped 15 percent in mid-June, CBRE said in its second-quarter market report.
Average rents rose 22 cents per square foot to $67.18, and now sit just 30 cents per square foot lower than the peaks hit just prior to the pandemic in early 2020.
All but approximately 3 million square feet of Boston Properties’ 51.6 million-square-foot portfolio comprises traditional office space, and only 6 percent of its rents are derived from life science tenants, according to its first-quarter report. The company is pursuing more than 5 million square feet of development projects for the life science industry nationwide.
Earlier this year, Boston Properties broke ground on a 330,000-square-foot lab development at 180 City Point in Waltham and plans to convert the 224,000-square-foot office building at 880 Winter St. in Waltham into a lab building.
