Is Your Town Or City Tough To Build In? Well Boston Properties Wants To Talk To You
Developers just love to curse and moan about local officials and their crazing zoning rules.
And let me tell you, especially hated are all the stubborn, NIMBY types so often found on city and town boards here in New England.
But don’t complain to hometown giant Boston Properties. Apparently, the grumpier and more difficult the local officials are to deal with, the better, as far as the company is concerned.
Hard to believe? Well check out Mortimer Zuckerman’s comments to Wall Street analysts earlier this week.
Zuckerman, the media mogul who chairs Boston Properties, noted the company would like to expand into a new market.
That’s significant, since BXP has spent years buying and building towers in New York, Boston and Washington.
But not just any old market. Rather, a major city with “high barriers to entry.” Let me translate: That’s code for hyper demanding local officials and endless red tape of the type that leave most developers threatening to take the next flight out. And of course, little if any land left to build on as well.
Not Boston Properties. The real estate investment trust has made untold millions over the years figuring out how to get permits to build in cities like Boston that routinely chew up and spit out other, less savvy developers.
How can that be good? Well it’s the competition, stupid – or more specifically the lack thereof.
BXP can be confident that its new, Russia Wharf office tower on Fort Point Channel will have to wait years, maybe longer, to face new competition. Over the past decade, BXP has been one of just a handful of developers who have figured out how to get things approved – and built – in Boston.
So if you are interested in recruiting Boston Properties, skip that portfolio highlighting the last big tower or two that was built in your downtown.
Forget the happy talk. Instead, send a box stuffed with all those grand plans submitted by developers that never got built. And for good measure, throw in a few press clippings of all the nasty things builders said about your town as they stomped off in frustration.