By Greg Ryan
Home Depot Inc. has paid $72 million to acquire a large chunk of a Watertown property that hosts one of its stores, though a Boston real estate developer continues to have preliminary approval to put a lab building on part of the site.
Following the transaction earlier this month, Boylston Properties still owns a portion of the parcel at 615 Arsenal St., which is part of the Arsenal Yards mixed-use development, according to real estate records. Boylston and a JPMorgan Chase & Co. unit had purchased the site in 2022 for $96 million.
The developer has planned a six-story, 175,200-square-foot lab building, named 300 Forge, for a corner of the property across the parking lot from Home Depot (NYSE: HD). Boylston has found success in making Arsenal Yards a lower-cost alternative for biotechs looking for a home outside Kendall Square and the Seaport District, though like other developers, it has faced substantially less demand in the past couple of years.
Just over a third of the lab space in the Route 128 submarket that includes Watertown is available for rent, according to new CBRE data. That’s higher than Cambridge’s availability rate, but about the same as Boston’s, and it’s significantly lower than the part of the region north of Boston that includes Somerville.
Boylston won the Watertown Planning Board’s approval in January to amend the master plan for Arsenal Yards to include the proposed 300 Forge. It will need to return to the board for another, final approval for the lab building.
That master plan holds that the Home Depot store will remain.
A Boylston Properties spokesperson declined comment. Home Depot did not respond to a request for comment.