| NYguy |
Feb 16, 2012 12:41 PM |
http://blogs.bostonmagazine.com/bost...-and-shouldas/
Filene’s: The Couldas and Shouldas
With the benefit of hindsight, ousted local developer John Hynes shares his thoughts.
BY Jason Schwartz
2/13/2012
Quote:
Millennium Partners, another New York outfit, will take the lead, with plans to build a 600 foot, $500 million tower, complete with apartments, office space, and retail. This is great news! The irony, of course, is if that building existed today, it would kill. Demand for apartments has never been greater in Boston and the office space market is going well, too. If Vornado had the foresight to invest in something like this a few years ago, they’d be making a killing right now, instead of being forced to compete with the gobs of other residential buildings now going up around the city.
None of that is lost on local developer John Hynes, who was Vornado’s man on the ground here in Boston on the original project, essentially quarterbacking the thing and helping conceive the design for One Franklin, the tower Vornado had intended to build before the market collapsed in 2008 and work stopped. Hynes, CEO and managing partner at Boston Global Investors, says that ever since the initial failure, he had worked to come up with alternatives, all the way up until two days before the Millennium deal was announced. That’s when he got the call from JP Morgan (previously a minority investor on the project) telling him he was out.
“I wanted Vornado and JP Morgan to do that three years ago when the office market dried up and the residential market started to respond,” he says, referring to the new building concept. “We actually had proposed several residential [buildings], but they weren’t ready to do it and they didn’t want to do it with us with their own money.”
“I think the quote we used in our meetings was, ‘Look you’ll be the only girls at the dance, you’re going to get your dances,’ and it fell on deaf ears. And I’m not pointing fingers at Vornado or JP Morgan — nobody wanted to do it, nobody bought that belief. Now, of course, everybody’s jumping into the pool,” Hynes says.
Even in the depths of the recession, Hynes believes, you could tell that demand for apartments in Boston was high. There are always tons of people flooding into the city, and with fewer people buying homes, more people were leasing, putting added pressure on the rental market. Of course, that’s all hindsight now.
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