The 45 Province development in Boston’s Downtown Crossing neighborhood may well be one of the many highlights of Tina Bacci’s career.

“Five years ago, people were looking at us like we were crazy,” Bacci recalled. But now a once-struggling development commands high rents and even higher sale prices for new residential developments in what was once considered to be a less-than-desirable neighborhood.

“The building was having a tough time moving units. … Tina and her team came in and the project turned a corner at that point,” said Eric Cataldo, a partner at the Boston real estate law firm Gilmartin Magence. “They sold out the building incredibly well, and given that we were going through the biggest recession since the Great Depression, that was a real feat for her as well.”

It’s a similar story with the Strada 234 in Boston’s North End.

“We started there when the expressway was still up in the sky and the Green line was above ground, and people thought, ‘Who’s going to buy residential units here?’” she said. “That neighborhood now is about to be one of the greatest in Boston. It’s just crazy.”

But that’s the pattern that emerges in Bacci’s work.

By her own admission, Bacci loves data and the stories it can tell her. She likes to pour through the information, pull out the possibilities that nobody else can see and get into the minds of potential buyers.

“Yes, it’s bricks and sticks, but with residential, there’s this whole other level where you have to understand the psychology of these buyers,” she said. “My background is in composition theory and rhetoric. A lot of that is understanding how people come to identify truths for themselves. Some people are scientific about it, some people are experiential about it. … All those things roll into real estate and targeting.”

Data, of course, is not Bacci’s only strength, her admirers say. Cataldo, who is just one of the four people who nominated Bacci for a Woman of FIRE award, expressed a great admiration for Bacci’s interpersonal finesse, as well.

“I know well the people she deals with. They’re the biggest players in town, the strongest personalities,” he said. “She has to not only manage that well, but she’s got to negotiate with people.”

By now, Bacci has touched almost every role within her chosen field, at various points holding titles like sales director, title researcher, closing coordinator and leasing director. What she finds especially rewarding about her career, she said, is that she can see the fruits of her work.

“Being a Bostonian, I like to be able to ride around the city and tell people I worked on this building or that building,” she said. “It’s great when you can get into an emerging neighborhood and see a change over the years. … Some of these buildings will change an entire neighborhood.”

Tina Bacci

by Laura Alix time to read: 2 min
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