March 17, 2021 — By Joe Clements
DEDHAM—There is an aura of deja vu along Interstate 95 here at the teeming juncture of Route One and 60 miles south off Exit 6A in Coventry, Rhode Island, as Fulcrum Real Estate Partners has divested two warehouses following its 60 Stergis Way sale, a $3.83 million exchange negotiated through exclusive broker 128 CRE barely two months after the Rhode Island building yielded $2.55 million during 2020’s waning moments, that transaction handled in-house by founding principals Robert C. Kirschner and Richard E. Putprush.
Secured a few months after Fulcrum’s autumn 2014 launch, both buildings were bought in the same order and in similar rapid-fire fashion as their trades five years hence, Putprush relays regarding June 2015’s buy of the 35,000-sf Coventry asset for $1.6 million and another $2.2 million spent in July on the 20,000-sf Dedham property. “It looks like we drew it up that way,” Putprush chuckles of the compressed time-frames while stressing the choreography was mere happenstance.
What the Needham-based firm had astutely “drawn up” were business plans to stabliize each property and harvest the assets reaping IRRs as initially pitched to equity partners. Each endeavor “surpassed” pro forma targets, Putprush tells Real Reporter while declining to give specific metrics.
Fulcrum selected the non-descript assets via guidance from street-level advisors about leasing prospects and market trends buttressed with their own experience eclipsing a half century combined in the New England CRE trenches, tenures enabling them to identify special elements of each opportunity.
The Fulcrum focus is between $2 million and $10 million but it could expand towards $15 million “for the right situation,” Kirschner outlines of a platform favoring industrial and office product whereas “ground zero” is Route 128 and adjacent communities. Geographic and state lines were crossed right away with Fulcrum’s Coventry agreement for the fallow DHL Freight facility included in a $2 billion block of similar assets which the Arizona REIT who bought it deemed an outlier and not sufficient “to warrant their attention,” a situation leading to Fulcrum’s purchase “well below replacement cost” at $45.75 per sf. Its December sale fetched $73 per sf.
