Recently, the W Boston Condos announced the opening of their on-site sales center that will welcome potential buyers to the newly opened 28-story iconic glass hotel and condo tower in Boston’s Theatre District. What’s the significance of this? Potential buyers will no longer need to visit the original sales center located in a low-rise office building on Newbury Street in Boston’s Back Bay, a far cry from the Theatre District, and ultimately, a situation that created a struggle for listing agency Otis & Ahearn to truly give clients an accurate feel for the luxe living experience of the W brand.
A sales center inside a development, rather than across town or down the street in a different structure, is something a condo developer wants as early in the development sales cycle as possible. A condominium developer wants to have a model unit finished as quickly as possible so that they can help buyers envision their living experience for what it will actually be. The trouble is, the construction process most oftentimes cannot accommodate the buildout of a complete unit in the midst of hard hat construction everywhere else. And that said, marketing firms like Otis & Ahearn that are marketing the condos at the W are stuck trying to make the best of a situation, trying to sell a product with models and a showroom that aren’t entirely representative of the end product, and involves shuttling highly qualified buyers to the development site to do hard hat tours during specific hours of the day to not disrupt mainstream construction (arguably, the time constraints are more of a safety concern than anything else).
With the launch of the Boston W Condos on-site sales center, sales velocity at the ultra-luxury development, where units range in size and price from studios to three-bedrooms starting at $400,000 to over $4,000,000, should begin to accelerate. According to LINK, one of the city’s two Boston MLS systems, only 11 of the 123 condos at the W have sold (9%). With the addition of the on-site sales center presence, giving buyers the ability to touch and feel the real product and tour the building all under one roof, Sawyer Enterprises, the developer behind the hip new building, is poised to make a strong sales push in the summer of 2010.
Keith Munsell 
