Downtown Crossing is becoming one of the most sought-after places for startups and established companies to relocate to. The location itself is a major amenity, providing public transit access on bus and subway lines and is in walking distance to much of Boston proper. It's more affordable than places like the Seaport District, at least for now, and is well beyond the event horizon of a major revitalization.
To that end, Paradigm Properties bought 93 Summer St. back in June with the intention of learning from the hiccups it encountered when revamping 101 Tremont St. (more on that below). The goal: to bring companies seeking a Downtown Crossing location a worthy space to operate in.
"They're doing a pretty aggressive renovation process," Matt Twombly, vice president of Avison Young, the property's listing agent, told me. "Paradigm is making it a really creative, cool, funky space."
Though 93 Summer St. won't be as airy and flexible as Hatch Fenway, a 100,000-square-foot startup space in the Fenway area that's soon to open, its 25,000 square feet of space will be used to house a handful of up-and-coming ventures or a combination of a few along with a larger business.
A double-edged sword for 93 Summer St. is that it consists of ground floor retail space as well as floors two through five. This could bode well for companies with various departments who don't mind a slight internal separation – maybe marketing will set up shop on the second floor while developers rock the third – and the smaller ones, the startups, who could theoretically be squeezed together on a single floor depending on size, but not all companies are built equal.
Some aren't quite as willing or able to be torn asunder.
"There's not a lot of 20,000-square-foot tenants that want to be split on floors," said Twombly. "There's lots of interest in [floors] one, two and three, and a few unique users looking at the whole building. But we find that larger users get split up into teams so its not so bad they're split over floors."
But this is just a minor speed bump for such a promising location. Once the hardwood floors are uncovered, brick exposed and sandblasted to its natural color, the lobby's redone and a new power system installed, it's hard to imagine the spaces inside 93 Summer will remain vacant for long.
And if it does, at least they're in a central location in Boston that lets them feel out potential tenants from various sectors and former locations.
Lessons learned
At 101 Tremont, the restoration was done in piecemeal fashion. Paradigm learned that this wasn't the most efficient or effective way of conducting an overhaul. At 93 Sumer, it'll be stripped to its bare bones and transformed from the inside out, learning aptly from growing pains incurred at 101 Tremont.
"They have the ability to recruit talent inside the city and outside the city," said Twombly. "It's an amenity-rich location. Anything you can imagine is at your fingertips or within a five minute walk. There's a huge rush of everyone going to the Seaport but as we've seen over time a lot of people are coming back to Downtown Crossing."
Look no further than Datadog as an example. According to the Boston Business Journal, the New York-based software company which expanded to Boston about a year ago and has since worked out of a co-working space as well as one near South Station, "has now leased a 12,000-square-foot office at 33 Arch St. in Downtown Crossing." Datadog's new home is just a stone's throw from 93 Summer St.
Twombly said that Paradigm is not discriminating against potential occupants for 93 Summer, that is they're gunning for "design firms, marketing firms, tech firms, software firms...someone who wants a conference room, an open space, collaborative space."
As for a timeline of when 93 Summer St. will be ready to be moved into, Paradigm is thinking it'll take about a month before the interior of the building is near-unrecognizable from its current state at which point they'll be soliciting commitments from tenants.
