Fidelity Puts Entire 800K SF Boston HQ Up for Sublease

Financial services firm Fidelity Investments is looking to sublease its entire Boston headquarters, amounting to nearly the same square footage leased in the entire city in the first quarter.

Fidelity is marketing all 803,000 square feet it occupies at 245 Summer Street for sublease, Bisnow reported. A first-quarter office market report from Savills said the move “will further pressure availability upward.”

The company, which declined to comment, leases a vast majority of the 14-story, 910,000-square-foot building near the South Station transit hub. Horizon Real Estate Investors, a Fidelity affiliate, purchased the property in 2020 for $728.5 million.

Fidelity isn’t leaving the city, but it is downsizing. The company is set to relocate next year to 650,000 square feet at Commonwealth Pier, the redeveloped World Trade Center property on Seaport Boulevard.

Fidelity employs more than 5,800 people in Boston, making it one of the city’s largest employers. Employees are required to be in the office 50 percent of the time, meaning its exit from Summer Street could also spell a drop in activity for local businesses.

Fidelity has been at 245 Summer Street since 1999, when it acquired the building. It sold it five years later to Benderson Development while continuing to lease. The building has served as Fidelity’s headquarters since 2012.

It’s a massive amount of space to come online at one time, considering the first quarter saw 1 million square feet of direct leasing activity in Boston, according to Savills. That was an improvement over 600,000 square feet in last year’s first quarter.

As for the sublease market, availability was down to 3.6 million square feet at the end of the first quarter, a 900,000-square-foot reduction from last year’s first quarter.

The availability rate in the city, meanwhile, was 23.5 percent in the first quarter, which included the first quarterly decline in three years.

— Holden Walter-Warner