Industrial Urbanism & Complex Urban Real Estate Assets

The Matrix Property Group manages real estate in the urban industrial, manufacturing, office and retail sectors of the Greater Boston market. The company has witnessed dramatic shifts in the use of, and demands on, real estate in these sectors. Every day we work to satisfy tenant requirements using our know-how of electricity, plumbing, heating ventilation and air conditioning, fire and security alarms, and geothermal cooling, together with administrative, accounting, and legal expertise, for the successful management of complex urban real estate assets. This Matrix blog post series kicks-off with an overview of the concept of industrial urbanism and how the properties we manage exist within their respective built-up locations. The Ames Business Park, Somerville, MA, the company’s trophy urban project, has become the entrepreneurial epicenter of Somerville and home to dozens of start-up’s including a brewery, rock climbing gym, t-shirt maker, artists, hackers, makers, green-tech/clean tech incubation and several interesting warehousing operations. The campus is dubbed the “Innovation Village”. We’ve sought to be creative with clear height, parking, and street level loading dock access. Each tenant space has been adaptively re-scaled from a large, industrial production facility to a small-scaler scale space, located within an innovative multi-tenant campus. Over $10M in renovations have been completed to-date. Businesses at the Ames Business Park have moved from consumptive production to clean and sustainable processes; from needing a relatively unskilled labor pool, to a growing need for an educated and specialized workforce. Just about each tenant is involved in some manner with an emerging technology or an important new process that has the potential to create high quality domestic-based jobs. In addition to our day-to-day work, Matrix seeks to facilitate partnerships between businesses, nonprofit and public companies and agencies to enhance business, strengthen families and sustain and respect the neighborhoods around the campus. We’ve even gone as far as building partnerships with the local high school by hosting a summer internship program. All this is accomplished by working within the standards and regulations required to achieve urban retrofitting while maintaining safe, productive places to work.