On Monday, Nov. 16, High-Profile hosts the Built Leadership Forum, a day built around one question: what gets built next, and who is going to lead it? The program starts with what leaders are seeing across capital and development, turns to how organizations are responding, and closes with where innovation has to move from innovation to impact. Every session is an intentionally crafted conversation delivering valuable insight from the region’ s built leadership. |
Thomas O’ Brien
A national and regional market briefing covers capital, pipelines, workforce and where opportunity may be emerging. Danielle O’ Connell, VP of digital portfolio and enablement at Skanska USA, takes on digital transformation in construction and where AI and automation are producing real results today. A cross-industry leadership panel brings together owners, developers, AEC and institutional leaders on where they are investing, adjusting and taking risk. The afternoon ends with a town hall, where every speaker returns to the stage to take questions from the room.
Setting the charge for the day is the opening keynote from Thomas N. O’ Brien, managing partner and CEO of The HYM Investment Group, on market realities, leadership and what gets built next. Ahead of the forum, High-Profile publisher Anastasia Barnes recently sat down with O’ Brien to talk about how he leads, what it costs to put up housing in Boston right now, the demographic trend that worries him most, and the one message he hopes the room walks away with.
Anastasia Barnes: You’ re known for bringing staff into decisions and asking for their perspectives before you land on an answer. Where did that approach come from, and how has it shaped the way HYM handles a tough market like this one?
Tom O’ Brien: Fundamentally, I came up in a team environment. I played team sports when I was younger, hockey and football, in high school and college, so I’ m used to working in teams and I like
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it. In fact, when we’ re hiring, we look for people who have worked in teams. That might be somebody with a military background, somebody who was an athlete, or somebody who has done a theater production. A theater production requires really good teamwork.
I also think better decision making comes from working in teams. It’ s part of a leadership philosophy: you need to be a good listener in order to be a good leader. So encouraging people to bring their perspective to a discussion and to think carefully about how we put a project together is really helpful. Being a team member is a key part of what it takes to work at HYM.
AB: When you look at what it takes to build a unit of housing in Boston today, what’ s driving that number, and what questions should the industry be asking to bring it down? Where have you found creative ways to make a deal work, whether through financing structure, partnerships or something else?
TO: We have two really important illustrations going on right now at our Suffolk Downs site in Revere. The first is a project being built today called Portico. It’ s about 475 units, a 14-story high-rise in steel construction. We’ ve been under construction there since January of this year, first units will deliver in February 2028, and the remainder of the units will be available in Spring 2028. The cost of building that building is $ 630,000 per unit, all costs in. It’ s an expensive building to build.
We’ re also designing, and hoping to begin this year, another residential building, about 250 units, a mid-rise wood frame building on a steel podium, which doesn’ t carry the high-rise premium. To get there, we’ ll need to focus hard on our costs for materials as well as labor. The capital for that project has been raised, so it could go. That’ s the challenge for all of us: finding our way toward more efficient, less costly residential buildings.
AB: You mentioned that the demographic shifts over the next five to ten years are what worry you most: softer apartment demand, slower household formation and an aging population. What are you seeing in the data, and what does it mean for what gets built?
TO: Here’ s my worry, just to be really clear. Our competitive advantage as a nation, and certainly one of our advantages here in Greater Boston, is that we’ ve been a welcoming place for immigrants, refugees and people from outside the United States. For Boston, that has really benefited us, because a lot of those people have been graduate students. They’ ve come here to
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go to school. They bring energy, ideas and activity. They want to start companies here, be part of existing companies here and be successful here, which is great.
In the last two years, given what’ s happening in Washington, the unfortunate thing is we’ ve seen fewer of those graduate students come here. The data from the colleges lags a bit, so we may not see it fully yet, but our suspicion is that we’ re attracting fewer of them, and that makes us nervous about our economy and where we’ re headed.
As a nation, we’ ve always been a slow-growth population. We’ re better off than some; Japan, China and others have significant demographic challenges ahead of them. But our edge has always been that we welcomed people from around the world, and we’ ve made ourselves far less welcoming. That’ s a huge competitive challenge for all of us.
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AB: In our last conversation, you described seeing competitors at every event, staying friendly and wanting to learn from what others in the business are doing. In a time this challenging, what does that look like in practice across developers, contractors, designers and even competitors?
TO: We do compete with one another, and believe me, when we’ re competing, we compete. We want to win like everybody. We have that competitive nature to our personality.
But when we see each other at events, and we frequently do, we talk. Oftentimes we’ ll exchange information: this is happening, that’ s happening, have you checked out this. I’ ve been working in this town pretty much all of my adult life, and in general it’ s a town filled with people of goodwill, people who want to see you do okay. I’ ve worked with a lot of these folks and known them for a long, long time, so it’ s been fun to work here.
AB: If you could get every developer, builder and lender in Boston to agree on one thing at the Built Leadership Forum, what would it be?
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TO: I’ m fortunate to have had a number of different chapters in my professional career, and I’ ve worked in a lot of different spots. When I was at Boston City Hall, I worked for Tom Menino during his first two terms in the 1990s. I was 29 when I first went to work there, and I learned a lot. Boston was just coming out of the national recession that kicked in around 1989 and 1990, and the attitude was: how do we work together, how do we communicate, how do we talk to one another about what it takes to make more projects happen?
We need to work as team members across every part of our sector, from government to developers to construction professionals to architects. Each of us is generally aware of the challenges: the cost of building projects, the availability of capital, the sourcing of materials. We need to be able to have conversations across all of those professional groups to get projects done. I think everybody in this audience will feel that, because they’ re living it.
AB: Were conversations like that happening back in the’ 90s?
TO: A lot of them were government-led. Because the city really wanted projects to happen.
The people you’ ll gather in that room already know this, but the one clear thing we all need to focus on is what we’ re all about: attracting capital and investing it in Greater Boston. Our business is finding interesting ideas. We have talented professionals who put a business plan together, build a pro forma and think carefully about what it takes to execute. But at the end of the day, we have to go find the money from a pension fund or a life insurance company, and it’ s a binary calculation. For a residential project, the required return on cost is probably around 6.5 %. Hit that number and the capital comes to the project. Miss it, and that capital goes to Nashville, New York, San Francisco or somewhere else. We want that capital in Boston, and we all need to work together with that understanding.
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