Monarch Capital buys Westborough flex building for $10.7M in first deal

Monarch Capital Partners has completed its debut acquisition, buying the 115,241-square-foot flex, R&D and shallow-bay industrial property at 115 & 117 Flanders Rd. in Westborough, Mass., for $10.7 million, or about $93 a square foot. The Boston-based investor sourced the deal off market and closed it in a joint venture with Lockspur Real Estate, the firm founded by Jeffrey Levine, with limited partner capital from a family office; Roy Sandeman of CBRE facilitated the transaction.

A basis below $100 a foot on 26.8 acres roughly 31 miles west of downtown Boston is lease-up underwriting; the two buildings are 52.5% leased, leaving just under half the square footage to fill, and the cost of filling it — tenant improvements, leasing commissions and downtime on empty bays — lands on the buyer's side of the ledger. That arithmetic is small in absolute dollars and large relative to the purchase price, which is why the entry price is doing the work here.

The tenant roster is the thesis compressed into one park: Resonetics makes medical devices, Ameresco and Ingenium Power work in energy infrastructure, VAIA Technologies develops AI-powered camera systems, and Alioth Biotech supplies advanced filtration systems to pharmaceutical manufacturers. Malcolm Constable, Monarch's managing partner, called rising public and private investment in “tough tech” — businesses that translate scientific and engineering work into products and systems — an important driver of the firm's investment thesis, and pointed to Greater Boston's concentration of research institutions, engineering talent and skilled workers. A half-leased flex building in Westborough is where that thesis meets an actual rent roll.

The structure says as much as the price. Monarch sourced the property off market, formed the joint venture with Lockspur, and raised LP equity from a family office for a $10.7 million debut — a size at which a first acquisition functions as a proof of concept. Off-market trades run on relationships, and there is no marketed pipeline to fall back on if those relationships cool, so whether Monarch can repeat the sourcing matters more than what happens at Flanders Road.

What follows is leasing. Filling the vacant half at Westborough flex rents would validate both the tenant thesis and the basis; a slow lease-up leaves Monarch with 26.8 acres and a rent roll covering just over half of it. The firm's second acquisition, whenever it comes, will show how much of this was template.