Aegean Capital Seals $14M Office Buy

BOSTON-Yet another commercial building has made it over the investment sales goal line to finish out a torpid first quarter of 2008 with a bit of momentum. Aegean Capital LLC has closed on 285 Summer St. in the city’s Fort Point Channel District, doling out $14.2 million for the 54,000-sf building, which is fully occupied by architectural firm Payette Associates.

“We are very happy about it,” Aegean founder Costas Alexakos tells GlobeSt.com after his firm cemented a deal that has been underway for several months. Alexakos acquired 285 Summer St. from a group of Payette principals who had leased the space back to the firm until 2011. Signed in 1991, the lease rate is substantially below market, Alexakos acknowledges, but he explains Aegean is buying for the building’s future, a bet based on the quality of the structure and presence in one of the Boston’s most vibrant districts. “We are comfortable with it,” he says of the patience mandated.

The per-sf price of about $267 is one reason Alexakos can take such a long-range view, he says. The figure likely would have been higher were the Payette lease shorter or closer to the market average, with Fort Point Channel space now fetching more than $40 per sf. In its just-released first quarter survey, Jones Lang LaSalle puts the average asking rate for the district at $47.71 per sf. While valuable in its own right, a level of parking in 285 Summer St. also impacted the per-sf pricing, according to observers familiar with the building.