GlobeSt.com 3/20/08 Last updated: March 20, 2008 09:23am

Tyco Sets Eyes on Taylor Woods Option

By Joe Clements

LITTLETON , MA-A real estate throwback from suburban Boston’s golden age of computers is close to getting a new lease on life, as Tyco International reportedly prepares to lease all of 151 Taylor St. The building is a two-story, 100,000-sf flex/office building located at the juncture of Route 2 and Interstate 495. The property is owned by the Bulfinch Cos. of Needham, which acquired it three years ago from Hewlett Packard for $4.3 million.

“It looks good that it is going to happen,” one source says of Tyco committing to the asset, which Bulfinch has renamed Taylor Woods as part of a repositioning campaign. The veteran development and investment firm has also made substantial capital improvements to the building after last summer taking out a $70-million mortgage from Anglo-Irish Bank Corp., enabling Bulfinch to pursue solid credit tenants circulating in the Interstate 495 region.

At this point, none of the parties involved seems willing to discuss the situation, with calls to Bulfinch and the landlord’s leasing agents at Richards Barry Joyce & Partners not returned by press deadline. RBJ principal Brian McKenzie and VP Jamey Lipscomb are exclusive leasing brokers for Taylor Woods, while Mark Reardon and Kerry Olson of CB Richard Ellis are conducting the space search for Tyco.

Reardon declined comment on the Taylor Woods rumors when contacted by GlobeSt.com, but the broker praises Bulfinch’s stewardship of the asset during its tenure and the property’s various attributes. “It’s a really nice building,” says Reardon, who would neither confirm nor deny reports that Tyco has already inked a letter of intent. Among the features for Taylor Woods cited by Bulfinch on its website are the building’s full-service cafeteria, an exterior patio and a high level of power and technology.

Sources could not say whether the Tyco search represents growth or would be a consolidation of other offices. While remaining mum on his client’s space chase, Reardon says he is encouraged overall by the level of activity prevalent in suburban Boston thus far in 2008. “We are tracking a number of requirements in the market,” Reardon tells GlobeSt.com, expressing confidence that several substantial agreements will be recorded during the next several weeks, possibly providing some momentum heading into the second quarter. If the Littleton pact is cemented, it will be another boost in the recovery of that community, which has risen and fallen over the past two decades on the health of the technology sector. After several down years, Littleton scored one of the top leases of 2007 when IBM Corp. opted to take more than 400,000 sf. there and in abutting Westford.