| Mark Rosenshein
Partner, Trademark Partners
Age: 48
Industry experience: 24 years
As a former architect and development adviser for Colliers International, Mark Rosenshein has the savvy to help developers design and permit complex projects. Rosenshein’s Trademark Partners is advising the owners of Charlestown’s Hood Park as they add new parking, office and lab buildings to the mixed-use campus, where a recently completed building at 100 Hood Park Drive offers 54,000 square feet of lab space, 24,000 square feet of retail and an 880-space parking garage. In Back Bay, Trademark Partners is advising developer Peebles Corp. on redevelopment on Massachusetts Department of Transportation air rights parcel 13 as a hotel-condo complex. Rosenshein practiced architecture for 18 years with The Architectural Team before joining Colliers International as a development adviser in 2016. He and Tessa Millard-Davies, another former architect-turned-development adviser at Colliers, founded Trademark Partners in 2018.
Q: What was the business strategy when you started Trademark?
A: We are an owner’s project manager full-service firm, and we do everything from assessing properties, hiring design teams and contractors, to coordinating the construction process. At Hood Park we’re involved with the lease-up. In the city of Boston, the permitting process is complicating and winding, so at Hood we also facilitate permitting. By virtue of having an architectural background but experience with construction supervision and development, we have an ability to look at how projects are put together and maximize value. Oftentimes, design teams struggle with how to reconcile the program from an owner with designs, because owners are not necessarily able to be definitive about what they want to lease translates into architecture and engineering. Sometimes a client says lab, but what they’re really talking about is R&D and we don’t need lab ventilation. If a project is high-end residential, there’s a wide range of what that means. Translating what that means with the level of design and architectural detail, you don’t end up with a client walking in and saying, “This isn’t as nicely done as I thought,” or, “Oh my God, I overpaid for millwork.”
Q: How was the recently-completed 100 Hood Park Drive designed for maximum flexibility in future uses?
A: I think it’s the best-looking garage in the city. There’s two floors of lab-ready space, including a ground floor which could be lab or retail. The building is ready to go. The parking is designed with flat plates and we can pull out every other level and convert it into lab. And it’s designed to take a 12-story office-lab building on top of that. Master-planned multifaceted projects are fascinating. As we move out of the city toward South Boston and Eastie, these are the kind of projects that are available: former industrial and underutilized sites that really need a creative process.
Q: What’s the type of project developers are asking about most frequently now?
A: Developers right now are trying to be very smart about their investments. We’re living in unusual times. The most complex conversation is the ratio of office to lab in a building. There are certain lab uses you can’t do at home. Clients are looking to maximize the current thinking about who has to go to the office, and what are the air quality and physical environment issues to make employees safe and comfortable. We used to see 50-50, and now I think it’s more 60-40 or 70-30 on the lab side.
Q: How will the resiliency zoning overlay and carbon-neutrality goals affect future development in Boston?
A: This is a really complicated moment where the policymakers of the city are thinking about the right things for carbon-neutral, but we may not have the physical technology yet. There are conversations about trying to do all-electric buildings. Lab buildings can’t be all electric. There is renewable gas, but it isn’t in the market yet. They’re moving the policy in the right directions and asking developers to think about it in the right way, but we’re struggling with how technology is keeping up with that. Developers need to think in two phases in their resiliency approach: what you can accomplish today, and how to build in systems that are more resilient and climate conscious over time. In 10 years, you don’t want to have to rebuild your entire mechanical plant. At Hood Park, we looked at district energy and a potential microgrid, but the only way to generate electricity locally is burning natural gas, so that doesn’t help us on the carbon targets set by the city.
Q: What are the highest prices for development sites in Boston by land use?
A: The pricing in Boston has not dropped through the floor. It’s still an expensive city to develop, and I don’t know a single developer who doesn’t put life science at the top of the list in finding tenants, and rate of return. It costs more to build labs than office, but the rate of return is much better. In the complicated conversation when you look at mixed-use, everybody wants to do a lot of life science, but we need to be creative about creating more affordable housing in these projects. It’s hard to do. Maybe the income on the lab space is offsetting the infrastructure that allows housing to be economically viable. At this moment, financing on anything in the middle of a pandemic is challenging, but it’s a one– or two-year problem, not a five– or 10-year problem.
Q: Between e-commerce and COVID-19, how are mixed-use developers approaching the question of how much retail is appropriate?
A: It’s going to be a year-long problem. The appetite for retail space has shrunk, but the city of Boston is looking long term and saying, “You still need to activate the ground floor of these spaces.” Developers are kind of hedging their bets on the definition of retail, meaning active space, community space, educational uses and entertainment components on the edge of retail.
Q: Where are the next opportunities for surplus public properties to be redeveloped?
A: One project is parcel 13, Don Peebles’ project at the Hynes station. Obviously, [Samuels & Assoc.’s] closing on parcel 12 and moving forward with the air rights project is huge. That opens up an opportunity. Fenway Center is moving forward and seems like they are next. Parcel 13 is completing its due diligence and we’ll be moving that one into permitting by the end of the year.
Rosenshein’s Five Favorite SCUBA Dives:
- La Dania’s Leap: North Shore, Bonaire
- Half Moon Wall: Half Moon Caye, Belize
- Dos Ojos Cenote: Tulum, Mexico
- Piton Wall: Sugar Beach, St Lucia
- Alice in Wonderland: South Shore, Bonaire
