Breakthrough sells South Boston site to P&G Gillette for $99.3M
Breakthrough Properties sold a South Boston waterfront site to P&G Gillette for $99.3 million, a 24 percent gain on what it paid in 2021.
Breakthrough Properties has closed the sale of its 232 A St. waterfront site in South Boston to P&G Gillette for $99.3 million. Gillette will develop a new Grooming Headquarters and Technical Innovation Center there, a project the company has said will cost nearly $1 billion. Gillette was founded in Boston about 125 years ago.
Breakthrough, a joint venture of Tishman Speyer and Bellco Capital, bought the site in 2021 for $80 million. The parcel spans 2.4 acres. The company won approval for a 325,000-square-foot research and development campus. The plan also set aside 1.5 acres of enhanced public realm along the Fort Point Channel. The property had been a surface parking lot; by the time of the sale, it carried a full entitlement package. Jonathan Varholak of CBRE brokered the transaction.
The price works out to about $305 per square foot of approved development. Breakthrough paid roughly $246 a square foot in 2021. That is a 24 percent gain on paper, before the carrying costs of the years between purchase and sale. The sale lands about five years after Breakthrough bought the site.
Executives on the seller's side called the outcome a validation of entitled waterfront land. Breakthrough's chief investment officer, Daniel D'Orazi, said the sale reflects demand for infill sites in leading innovation markets. Tishman Speyer's Jessica Hughes described Gillette's commitment as a major long-term investment in Boston.
Gillette is buying the site to occupy, not resell. It says it will spend roughly ten times the land price on the build-out, a sign that the value lies in the campus, not just the address. For the Tishman Speyer-Bellco venture, the closing is a clean exit before construction starts; the construction program, and its risk, falls to a corporate owner. Owner-occupier trades like this one give investors a clean read on entitled land values, because the price reflects a user's mission rather than a speculative development pro forma. In land markets, the approval is often the product.
The Wrap