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Jodie Zussman
President and CEO, Boston Development Group
Age: 61
Industry experience: 40 years
Jodie Zussman returned to Massachusetts after a series of out-of-state careers to take the reins of the family business, Newton-based Boston Development Group. Her father and the firm’s chairman, David Zussman, began his business career as a door-to-door salesman before transitioning to homebuilding and commercial development. The firm owns approximately $200 million worth of commercial real estate in Boston, Needham, Newton, Waltham and Watertown, where it received approval this year for a 450,000-square-foot life science development at 66 Galen St.
Q: What’s the composition of Boston Development Group’s current portfolio?
A: We have really been involved in almost every class of real estate but right now, we’re most heavily concentrated in office buildings and some retail including Piccadilly Square in Newton Centre. We’ve been working with all of our tenants and deferred a lot of rent, working with everybody and trying to keep them in business. Other than our restaurants which are really hurting, our retailers seem to be getting through this time with help from the U.S. government and PPP. We’re better off than some of the huge retailers that have such huge rents. On the development side, we have this one project [at 66 Galen St. in Watertown] that was just entitled for 234,000 square feet, and then following this we have a second phase which will be a similar size. And we are now looking at demolition to put up 65,000 square feet of medical office buildings at 629-661 Highland Ave. in Needham.
Q: What was the impetus for your decision to join the family business?
A: I had left [Massachusetts] after I graduated college. I worked for a few different real estate companies, starting at the bottom and working my way to the top. I then started my own business which I ran for over 20 years. In 2005, I moved to Florida and worked as a broker. I have been back in Boston for close nine years. Because I was the one in the family with all of the real estate experience, I was my father’s succession plan.
Q: What is Boston Development Group’s growth strategy?
A: We have six properties in downtown Boston and five at North Station, which was just booming with The Hub on Causeway, and we were doing great. But with COVID coming in and everybody kind of escaping Boston, and knowing that we have the best educated class of people here working in life science and the need for life science space, we decided we had an opportunity.
Q: How long did it take to assemble the parcels in Watertown for the lab project?
A: We owned a building on Water Street in Watertown since 2000. And when the Colonial dealership became available for sale, we said, “This is right next-door to our property and we can add on. Let’s look into buying that.” Knowing that life science was prevalent, we met with the town and they said they’d love life science there. They didn’t want anything else. So that started our quest into life science. There are five parcels and it took about a year to assemble them, which is really very quick. There was a vacant gas station lot, there was Colonial Nissan, there was a house that burned down, and there was another house that one person lived in. The only ongoing business was a Valvoline shop.
Q: What are the project’s transportation management strategies?
A: Multiple. Our traffic engineer said he’s never seen such a great transportation management plan. We are putting in adaptive signals, we’re creating a bus lane on Galen Street. We have two parks that are about 40 percent of the whole property and we’re going to be putting in a drop-off for the bus and a screened area directly across from the MBTA parking lot. That part of Galen Street was so horrendous with the traffic: it was begging to be reconfigured. We’ve been working with the MBTA for over a year on making the circulation better and we believe we will have done that. We’re eliminating seven curb cuts along Galen Street, and creating a new street where the buses will exit instead of down at the existing light, which will free up a lot of that traffic.
Q: How dramatically has the Bulfinch Triangle submarket changed with the North Station development boom?
A: We’ve owned those properties over the last 20 to 25 years, adding on as we’ve gone along, and the area has changed tremendously. About eight years ago, rents were $25 a square foot. They went up to $50 per square foot and now they are leveling off and almost dropping a little bit due to COVID, but I’m optimistic. We own the building where the Four’s Boston was and we’re looking for another tenant. We’re getting interest, but I still think we’re a little ways away.
Q: What makes Needham a good market for medical office development?
A: We did some research and talked to brokers and asked where the demand was. With all of the Massachusetts Department of Transportation work, they’re going to come close to the property line expanding that road, and it’s a good time to redevelop it. What we’re hearing is that medical is what’s really needed right now, and right off [Route] 128 is a great location.
Zussman’s Five Most Recently Read Books
- “Educated: A Memoir”
- “The Henna Artist”
- “The Vanishing Half”
- “The Daughters of Yalta”
- “The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo”
