Simmons College Sells Six Back Bay Buildings for $32M

BOSTON-New York City-based developer Terramark has acquired six Back Bay buildings for $32 million from Simmons College. The college, which had used the buildings for its School of Management, plans to use proceeds to fund a business school on the college's main campus in the city's Longwood area.

The properties, five townhouses on Commonwealth Avenue and another on Marlborough Street, total approximately 90,000 sf. Terramark plans to convert the buildings into condominiums, Lisa Chapnick, senior vice president of administration and planning at Simmons, tells GlobeSt.com. Three of the buildings are vacant but the remainder of the buildings are being leased back to the college until its new center is completed in the fall of 2009.

"These are wonderful for homes, which is what they were built for, but they were never built for institutes for learning," Chapnick says of the properties, which are located on the outskirts of Kenmore Square about a mile away from Simmons' main campus. "They are inefficient for our purposes and in order to modernize these buildings, you would have to destroy their history and that wasn't about to happen."

The business school, which exclusively trains women executives, intends to spend about $67 million to construct a 66,000-sf business center along with a 715-car underground garage on its main campus on what is now a parking lot between the Park Science Center and One Palace Road. Construction on the parking facility is set to begin next May with construction of the business center planned for May 2007.

While the new business center will be smaller than the management school's current Back Bay location, Chapnick says its more modern design will be large enough to accommodate the 20 faculty members, 250 MBA graduate students, 180 undergraduates and 600 business people who take executive business courses at the school.