Jamestown has offloaded the 12-story office building at 18 Tremont Street, a block from Boston Common, to a local conversion-focused buyer for about $29.5 million, a sharp cut from the roughly $103 million the firm paid in 2019. The sale ends seven years of Jamestown ownership and underlines just how fast downtown office values have been repriced.
Industry reports identify the buyer as Kendall Capital and peg the purchase price at about $29.5 million. According to CoStar, Jamestown completed the disposition this month, while CommercialSearch reports that Institution for Savings provided roughly $20.6 million in acquisition financing and that the property totals about 202,000 square feet across 12 floors.
How steep the markdown was
The reported sale price represents roughly a 71 percent drop from the approximately $103 million Jamestown paid in 2019, a swing that industry outlets have called one of the largest downtown repricings in recent years. ConnectCRE has summarized local coverage noting that Boston’s vacancy rate climbed substantially after the pandemic, putting the squeeze on older Class B office buildings in particular. That pressure has triggered a wave of discounted sales and made conversion plays increasingly attractive to local developers.
Conversion incentives tilt the math
Lower purchase prices help blunt the high cost of turning office space into housing, and Kendall has been leaning into that play. The firm recently bought 320 Summer St. and secured city approval to add about 145 apartments, according to industry reporting. Boston’s Office-to-Residential Conversion Pilot further sweetens the numbers with fast-track permitting and a property tax abatement of up to 75 percent for as long as 29 years, according to reporting from the Boston Globe. That combination of discounted acquisitions and municipal incentives has helped build a growing pipeline of downtown conversions.
Kendall has not publicly laid out its specific plans for 18 Tremont, leaving neighbors and retail tenants to wonder whether the next chapter will be renovation, full conversion, or some hybrid redevelopment. For brokers watching from the sidelines, though, the sale itself is the headline: investors are now pricing many older Boston office buildings as future adaptive-reuse projects rather than long-term office holds.
