MIT Expands With $90M Portfolio Buy

CAMBRIDGE, MA-Continuing to grow near its main campus, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is paying $90.5 million for an assemblage of properties in the city’s Cambridgeport section. While physically unassuming, the four buildings purchased are occupied by promising life sciences companies and the portfolio is in a strategically advantageous area, just outside busy Central Square and University Park at MIT. The school has an ownership stake in the 27-acre master planned complex.

“That is correct,” Colliers Meredith & Grew investment sales chief Lisa Campoli tells GlobeSt.com of MIT’s acquisition of the Cambridge Life Sciences Portfolio. “We had a ton of interest in it.” Campoli’s firm was retained, on behalf of a family trust, to sell the package, which has 148,000 sf of space and two parking lots. Joining the EVP in brokering the sale were CMG principal Joseph Flaherty and VPs Tucker Hansen and Nicholas Herz.

GlobeSt.com first reported last autumn, that MIT was negotiating to acquire pieces of the package, but school officials and CMG officials declined to discuss the matter at the time. The assets were sold by members of the Stimpson family, whose predecessors constructed many of the buildings in the 1920s to facilitate the namesake Stimpson Terminal Co.