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Major Kendall Square Developer Pays $330m For Waltham Office Complex

The deal continues a trend toward more life sciences expansion outside of Boston and Cambridge.

August 28, 2020 | By Boston Globe

Boston– In the latest sign that major life science developers are looking beyond crowded Kendall Square in Cambridge, Kendall heavyweight Alexandria Real Estate Equities this week closed on a deal to buy a Waltham office park, along with room to expand.

Alexandria paid $330 million for the Reservoir Woods East campus from Davis Co. and Marcus Partners, according to real estate firm Newmark Knight Frank, which helped broker the deal. The two-building complex, off Winter Street, is home to the US headquarters of utility company National Grid and a 202,000-square-foot lab complex leased to Verizon, which plans to move out for a new building in downtown Boston next year. Along with that soon-to-be-available space, the complex is permitted for 404,000 square feet of office space to be developed, Newmark said.

The purchase by Alexandria is notable because the firm — one of the biggest landlords in Kendall Square and developers of an entire corridor of tech and life science buildings along Binney Street there — has increasingly spread its wings around Greater Boston in the last two years. It’s bought and developed high-profile sites in Watertown, Fort Point, and now Waltham as demand for space from life science companies spills out around the region.

This project, with its mix of a blue-chip tenant, soon-to-be-available office space, and development potential was especially attractive, said Newmark vice president Edward Maher, who represented the seller in the deal.“The property presents an exceptional opportunity to benefit from the momentum of the Waltham-Lexington life science cluster, which has become a bona fide extension of Cambridge in recent years,” Maher said.