BOSTON–The UMass Board of Trustees and the UMass Building Authority (UMBA) voted on Thursday to designate Accordia Partners to build a mixed-use urban innovation campus on the 19.94-acre Bayside property in Boston, the university said in a statement on its website.
The deal could yield the university upto $235 million over time, according to media reports.
“A final lease agreement with Accordia Partners, led by veteran Boston real estate executives and financiers Richard Galvin and Kirk Sykes, will be negotiated and signed at a later date as the Galvin-Sykes team ramps up a “robust stakeholder and community input process” to plan out uses for the waterfront property,” reported WBUR.
Accordia Partners, LLC was formed in September 2014 with the intent of pursuing large, complex, urban real estate development projects within Boston, according to the company’s website.
Led by partners Kirk Sykes and Richard Galvin, Accordia Partners has a combined 60 years of development experience in the Boston market. A core component of Accordia’s mission is to leverage the scale of these urban projects in order to increase the level of inclusion and diversity within the real estate, design, and construction industries.
University of Massachusetts had bought the Bayside property via UMBA in 2010 from LNR Partners, Inc. for $18.7 million. The site was formerly home to the Bayside Expo Center.
Since 2010, UMass Boston has utilized the property primarily for parking and has serviced the debt on the acquisition, with the intent of future development to meet needs of the UMass Boston campus.
In 2017, UMass President Marty Meehan, with the support of the UMass Board of Trustees, asked UMBA to begin a process that would result in the development and monetization of the Bayside Property, according the university website.
