Construction may be temporarily paused in Boston but with strong market fundamentals in place prior to the pandemic the over $16.5 billion in projects that are in process will (hopefully) soon be safely active again. With over 34 million square feet of development across the city, how can those of us in the CRE industry track these projects and find the largest 50 under construction, or the top 50 most important to our particular business? Whether you need this data for business development purposes, research or comps, or you are just looking to for general market knowledge, what is the best way to easily find this information?
As we all know, there are a plethora of cranes dotting Boston’s skyline so you could go old school and drive around searching these out and jotting down information from the permitting signage. Gas is cheap right now and there is no traffic but realistically you don’t have time for that and it’s certainly not a sustainable strategy. You could check the Boston Planning Board website, but anyone who has spent any time navigating the labyrinth of PDF documents on there knows you really don’t have time for that either. Plus you’ve got to hope the project status is updated here in a timely fashion. Often times projects show as approved but really have started construction months ago. Speaking of starting construction, maybe you might check the Boston permitting website. Again, you don’t have time to scroll through pages, upon pages of records, rifling through permits for generators on movie sets and single-family home bathroom renovations. It’s a tedious process and again YOU DON’T HAVE TIME FOR THAT! Most of you probably turn to a google search which might reward you with a list of top ten or twenty projects, many of which are already outdated. Also, where is this data pulling from? Many of these lists are created by submission, so if a large project team doesn’t raise their hand, that development is not included on a particular site’s lists. These lists also lack hard data. They most likely include a project overview and one or two stats but what about full project team information, and numerous data points on costs, square footage and number of units.
Now if you’re reading this, you know here at BLDUP we are tracking projects across Boston (and the suburbs) and you’ve probably seen the individual pages for these major projects like The Hub on Causeway & Bulfinch Crossing. But what you might not realize is that you can easily put together a list of the largest projects under construction in Boston (or Cambridge, or the burbs) in less than 5 minutes with our InTheKnow product. Want to sort by square footage, you can do that, want to sort by construction costs, sort that way. Once you’ve created your list of the 50 largest projects you can then select which data points are most important to your business. Perhaps you want to see total building square footage, square footage of land, project start date, developer information (including contact info), architect name and general contractor. Just a couple clicks and all this information can be compiled and then exported to a spreadsheet. We are doing all the legwork for you plus we are continuously updating these projects and our database so when a new permit is pulled to start construction on a 500K SF project, your list of the largest projects will automatically update to include this new information. Start your free trial of InTheKnow now and see how much time you can save on research and find valuable leads for your business.
