Realterm adds 10.25 Boston acres while staffing its Europe build-out

Realterm has bought two industrial outdoor storage properties in the western Interstate 495 submarket of Boston, 10.25 acres split between Ayer and Devens, with no price attached. The same announcement carries the more consequential line from Europe: assets across major freight corridors now exceed €1.2 billion, and a new chief accounting officer for the region arrives with them.

Ayer contributes 3.5 acres, an 8,200-square-foot maintenance building, four drive-through bays and fueling on site; Devens adds 6.75 acres, a 12,000-square-foot maintenance building and one drive-through bay. Ed Brickley, a managing director and senior fund manager at Realterm, said the deal fits the firm's strategy of targeting industrial assets in high-barrier-to-entry markets where institutional and user demand run strong.

Both yards are improved and operable, which is the scarce half of the trade. Our earlier report on these two properties read it from the buildings side: the improvement, not the raw acreage, is what clears in IOS, and the same logic runs through the sector's larger flows — the institutional share of IOS investment has climbed to 45 percent from 30 percent in four years, pulled in part by construction staging for data-center buildouts, a demand source with an expiration attached.

Pricing evidence stays thin; Jadian Capital's $167 million Staten Island IOS purchase in August drew attention because it printed a number at all. Most IOS clears privately, so a two-property acquisition with no disclosed price adds acres to Realterm's portfolio and nothing to anyone else's comparables.

Catherine Lane joins as chief accounting officer, Europe, responsible for accounting and financial reporting across the firm's fund, property and management entities — fund accounting, investor reporting, property accounting, treasury oversight and the third-party provider relationships underneath them. She comes from EQT Real Estate in London, where she was director of finance and reporting, and earlier worked at Logicor Group, APN and PwC London. Realterm runs an open-end core-plus fund and a closed-end value-added series in Europe; its second Pan-European logistics fund closed in 2025 with more than €470 million in commitments.

A single fund does not need an accounting role scoped across three entity types and the vendors beneath them; the reason to build it now is the next European vehicle, an inference the firm has not confirmed but the sequence supports: a 2025 fund close, a €1.2 billion portfolio, and a finance bench imported from a London peer. Against $10.9 billion in registered assets, per this publication's records, 10.25 acres in Ayer and Devens is a top-up Realterm can absorb quietly. The next close in the European series is the number worth reading.