Transit Realty Starts Third MBTA Contract

BOSTON-A public-focused real estate firm sporting national aspirations is celebrating a milestone where it all began, with Transit Realty Associates beginning its third contract and 12th year managing real estate for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. The MBTA is the leading provider of public transit in eastern Massachusetts, and has 4,000 land parcels, 400 miles of right-of-way and a lease portfolio exceeding 800 agreements.

“We do have a lot going on,” TRA executive director Lorna Moritz tells GlobeSt.com in acknowledging the firm’s breadth. During the first 11 years since the MBTA agreed to outsource its real estate operations, TRA has produced more than $175 million in gross non-fare revenues and tripled the agency’s recurring lease income, she says, plus has provided the financial wherewithal to modernize the MBTA’s operations and enhance ridership. There is another element of green, as TRA’s assistance has fostered the advent of so-called smart growth, also referred to as transit-oriented development. It is a concept Moritz says the TRA was “working on even before they called it transit-oriented development,” and now the firm is entertaining a wave of proposals embracing the idea.

TOD projects on the MBTA network include one at Woodland Station in Newton where 180 apartments were built by a private developer. The pact fostered $4.3 million to erect a 548-unit parking garage, new roadways and a handicapped accessible platform, plus a deal to share maintenance costs of the grounds. In Boston, the Red Line subway’s aging Ashmont Station is being modernized thanks to a developer’s deal to build 100 units of housing and retail on an underutilized parking lot. That venture was fomented by MBTA staffers exploring ways to overcome a budget shortfall to make the needed repairs, Moritz explains. “It is a great project,” she adds. That same firm, Trinity Financial, is also doing a TOD on MBTA land at North Station in Boston, a $135-million mixed-use complex known as Avenir that will yield 241 residential units and 30,000 sf of retail. That and an adjacent project produced $27 million for the MBTA.