Newbury Street Asset Trades for $7M

BOSTON-Matching the 2007 sales pace on Newbury Street will be a challenge, but commercial properties on the internationally known retail strip continue to change hands as the new year commences. The latest trading is 125 Newbury St., a small but well-located asset situated mid-block between Clarendon and Dartmouth streets.

“It’s a really nice building,” broker Thomas Brennan of C. Talanian Realty says of the five-story structure. The building was acquired by an Irish investment group, Newbury RB LLC, for $6.8 million. It is the last of five properties that members of the Hall family have sold on Newbury Street in the past year after ownership that dates to the 1930s. Brennan handled all of those transactions and sold 11 Newbury St. buildings last year overall for a value of nearly $65 million, his best season ever in nearly a quarter-century covering the market. “It’s never been hotter,” he says, having witnessed close to 30 assets on the street sell during the year, many to Irish capital being represented by Boston-based Taurus Investments. A Spanish group paid close to $50 million for a retail condominium at 360 Newbury St.

Similar to the foreign shoppers seeking bargains in the stores, commercial property sales on Newbury Street are being fueled partly by the weak dollar, says Brennan. “It’s like getting a 30% discount,” he says in citing that element as one reason for the increased activity among cross-border capital. The global cache of Newbury Street is also attractive, he says, and having the tightest retail vacancy rate in his tenure has further emboldened buyers to pay hefty figures to acquire a piece of the action. “There are bidding wars right now,” Brennan says of the leasing environment, adding that 125 Summer St. has always leased well, with an efficient layout and its own elevator among the 6,500-sf building’s attributes.