The Motor Mart Garage, the century-old parking structure at 201 Stuart St. on the edge of Back Bay and Bay Village, has a new owner. Related Beal, the Boston arm of New York developer Related Cos., and Fort Lauderdale investor Freeport Equity said on Wednesday, Oct. 14, that they had acquired the 1,037-space garage from Los Angeles-based CIM Group. The Boston Globe, citing a source with direct knowledge of the deal, reported the price at $89 million, about 45 percent below the $162.5 million CIM paid in 2016.
The Motor Mart Garage deal at a glance
- Size: $89 million, as reported by the Globe from an anonymous source. The buyers did not disclose a price, and the deal had not appeared in Suffolk County deed records as of Wednesday afternoon, according to the Globe and Bisnow.
- Discount: roughly $73.5 million less than CIM’s 2016 purchase, a drop of about 45 percent.
- Start date: the sale closed this week and was announced Oct. 14, 2026. CIM had bought the property on Oct. 24, 2016, according to Bisnow, and hired CBRE to market it in January 2026.
- End date: none set. Related Beal said it will keep running the garage and its ground-floor retail while it explores future residential and mixed-use development. No construction timeline has been announced.
- Scale of impact: 1,037 parking spaces on a 1.2-acre block, about 49,000 square feet of retail space that CBRE’s listing put at 46.8 percent leased, and roughly $7 million a year in parking income, according to Bisnow’s review of the listing.
A stalled condo tower and a changed market
CIM’s plans for the site were ambitious. Bisnow reported that the company first filed in March 2018 for a 17-story building with 280 homes, then expanded the proposal six months later to 20 stories and 306 units. Working with Boston Global Investors, CIM won city approval in October 2019 for a 310-foot tower that would rise from inside the existing garage. The Globe reported that the approved plan called for 231 condos, a ninth-floor roof deck and possibly a grocery store.
The project never broke ground. The Globe reported that CIM estimated the tower would cost $525 million to build at the time of approval, and that the same job would cost at least $775 million today, based on the newspaper’s analysis of federal construction pricing data. Bisnow noted that CIM reached an agreement with the city on transportation improvements in 2024, but the tower still did not move forward.
The condo market has also cooled. According to Bisnow, developers built more than 2,000 condos in Boston over the past seven years, but only one condo project was under construction as of this summer, and June data from The Collaborative Cos. listed the Motor Mart redevelopment as the only luxury condo project in the city’s pipeline at that time.
What stays the same at 201 Stuart Street
For drivers and diners, little changes right away. Related Beal said in its announcement, as reported by Connect CRE, that it intends to continue operating the parking garage and the retail floor while it works with the City of Boston and neighborhood stakeholders on longer-term plans. Maggiano’s Little Italy remains a tenant, according to Bisnow, while former tenants Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse and Legal Sea Foods have closed since 2016. The century-old Art Deco building, fully restored in 1999 according to Connect CRE, sits a short walk south of the Public Garden and Boston Common, near Park Square.
Any new development on the site would need fresh review by the city’s planning department, since the buyers have not said whether they would pursue the approved tower, a new design or something else. Related Beal has built lab, office, residential and hotel projects in the Seaport, Kenmore Square and Charlestown, according to Bisnow.
Part of a wave of discounted Boston property sales
The Motor Mart is one of the steepest markdowns in a run of Boston sales below prior prices. The Globe noted that Oxford Properties Group bought a 99-percent-leased Seaport office building this summer for $435 million, a 10 percent discount, and that the 32-story, 1.1-million-square-foot tower at 100 Summer St. is scheduled for a foreclosure auction next week. Our recent report on record office rents at the top of Boston’s market shows the other side of that split, with top-tier buildings still drawing premium tenants. The sale also follows other ownership changes at historic downtown properties, including the final sale of the Union Oyster House.
Lenders expect more of these trades. S&P Global Market Intelligence projects $1.26 trillion in commercial real estate mortgages will come due in 2027, up from $950 billion in 2024, the Globe reported. “That is going to present a great deal of opportunity. It’s also going to present some pain,” Ian Brandon, chief commercial banking officer at Cambridge Savings Bank, said at a Bisnow event on Wednesday, according to the Globe.
Reactions
“Motor Mart sits at the heart of a neighborhood we have been investing in for many years and holds great possibility for future residential and commercial development,” Related Beal president Kimberly Sherman Stamler said in a statement. She called the garage “iconic” and did not share further detail on plans for the property, the Globe reported. CIM did not immediately respond to requests for comment from the Globe or Bisnow.
Our Take
Analysis, separate from the reporting above. The price tells the story of downtown Boston development in 2026: a site with a city-approved high-rise sold for little more than half its 2016 value because the approved building no longer pencils out. A buyer that can collect about $7 million a year in parking income while waiting has room to be patient, which suggests the garage will stay a garage for some time. The bigger question for the neighborhood is whether a lower land cost makes a smaller or rental-focused project workable, a shift that would mirror the city’s recent push to use tax incentives to restart stalled housing. Watch for any new filing with the planning department as the first sign of Related Beal’s plans.