There’s a new boss at one of Boston’s biggest, and busiest, life science real estate developers.
Alexandria Real Estate Equities said Monday that Tom Andrews, the longtime top executive at the firm’s Cambridge office, stepped down from his position last week. Hunter Kass, who joined Alexandria in 2018, will take over local operations for the firm, a Kendall Square heavyweight which is rapidly expanding into other pockets of Greater Boston.
Andrews, a well-known and genial presence in local development circles who just last month was named 2021 board president of commercial real estate trade group NAIOP Massachusetts, has been an executive at Alexandria for more than 20 years. In that time, California-based Alexandria has built or purchased about 8.5 million square feet of life science-oriented lab and office space, much of it in Kendall Square, placing the firm among the biggest developers in Greater Boston.
More recently, as the region’s life science industry has grown beyond its roots in Kendall, Alexandria has scooped up sites in Fort Point and South Boston, such as the one-time headquarters of GE on Necco Court; in Waltham, where in August it bought the Reservoir Woods office complex; and in Watertown, where it spent $525 million in late 2019 to buy the athenahealth campus on Arsenal Street, with plans for new development there.
In a regulatory filing late Monday, Alexandria said Andrews was stepping down from his position as co-president and regional market director for Greater Boston for “personal reasons” and will stay with the company “in a different capacity to assist with transitional matters.” The company declined further comment, though people familiar with the move said it has been planned for some time.
Taking over will be Kass, who has led Alexandria’s development efforts and acquisitions in Boston since joining the company in 2018. The 38-year-old previously worked at MITIMCO, the endowment and investment arm of Massachusetts Institute of Technology — another major Kendall Square builder. At Alexandria, he has worked on the permitting of several million square feet of development in Cambridge and led leasing of roughly 1 million square feet of office space.
Tim Logan can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter at @bytimlogan.
