Hot Condo Market Leads Developer Of Ritz To Put Apartments Onblock Boston Condos For Sale Ford Realty

Oh, this is rather

interesting. The Ritz-Carlton is doing away with the Phillips Club and selling those units as

condos. I guess I misunderstood how the Phillips Club worked. Apparently, those units

were always owned by Millennium Partners; I thought they were sold to individual investors and

rented out, similar to hotel-condos in other cities.

Regardless, now those units will

come on the market. It will be interesting to see how they end up pricing them. They

did well selling out the two buildings, although it wasn’t easy and took

awhile.

By Chris Reidy, Globe Staff

The

developer of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel & Towers, Boston Common, will sell 63 rental apartments as

condominiums and take advantage of the hot condo market.

The towers, which opened in

2001, already have 304 luxury condos that were initially priced from $500,000 to $6 million, said

Anthony Pangaro, principal of Millennium Partners-Boston, the project’s

developer.

The towers include a hotel and the Phillips Club — apartments renting

from $4,500 to $6,000 a month. They’ll go on sale as condos in late summer.

Many

large developments are built in phases, but the Ritz was built all at once in the hope that it

would quickly transform a marginal area near the old Combat Zone, Pangaro said. As a result, the

Ritz is larger than a typical new Boston luxury tower of about 100 condos or fewer. With a project

so big, the challenge was to avoid saturating the market, and a decision was made to spread the

condo sales over several years.

Part of that plan was to set aside several floors as

the Phillips Club, which targeted out-of-town executives visiting Boston for several weeks or more

to spend time at their corporate headquarters.

But soon after the opening, the

economy slumped, and acquisitions reduced the number of Boston headquarters companies. That meant

less business than expected for the Phillips Club, Pangaro said.

Still, the plan

always had been to consider converting those units to condos once the original Ritz condos were

nearly sold out, Pangaro said. About a dozen remain available.

apartments on block

Hot condo market leads developer of Ritz to put apartments onblock