FormerGE HQ gets two new tenants
Arnold and Havas embrace hybrid work
Boston-based advertising agency Arnold Worldwide and Havas Media are moving into the former headquarters of General Electric at 5 Necco St., a spokesperson said Thursday.
Arnold and Havas Media, which are both owned by the French advertising and public relations company Havas and have roughly 400 employees in Boston, expect to move into the 70,000-square-foot space in Fort Point this year.
“With our current lease coming to an end, we saw an opportunity to identify a new home for our Boston Village (which includes Arnold and other Havas entities based here),” an Arnold spokesperson said. “Having evolved our attendance model over the past few years, the new footprint is a reflection of a modern, vibrant and hybrid workforce.”
Among Arnold’s clients are pet supplies retailer Chewy, Progressive Insurance, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to its website.
The two companies will move out of 125,000 square feet they occupy at 10 Summer St. — known as The Burnham Building — in the heart of Downtown Crossing.
Downsizing into newer space has become a fairly common move in downtown’s post-pandemic office market, as companies adjust to a more work-from-home world and massive leases have largely fallen by the wayside. At 70,000 square feet, this is one of the larger lease deals signed in recent months in Boston, where the office vacancy rate has risen to its highest rate in at least two decades, according to real estate firm Newmark.
Arnold and Havas Media’s decision to move into the former Necco factory is also the latest shakeup at the prop
erty that once was expected to host a sprawling headquarters for GE.
GE made a splash when it announced in 2016 that it would move to Fort Point. The company’s decision to move from Connecticut to Boston was a major win for the administrations of Governor Charlie Baker and Mayor Martin J. Walsh, who were both in office at the time.
The vision for the headquarters — a new 12-story glass building, 390,000 square feet in all, connected to the older, red-brick Necco buildings at 5 and 6 Necco St. — were meant to reflect GE’s status as a “digital industrial” giant the company said in 2016.
But those plans never came together. After a new CEO at GE took over, the company sold 15 Necco St. — the planned site of the GE 12-story tower — to Alexandria Real Estate Equities and National Development, which is building a research center for pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly that is expected to open in August.
GE completed renovations to the Necco buildings and moved in during the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, but then in 2022 announced plans to move out for smaller space. The company said in February 2023 it would move into a 30,000-square-foot office on the 37 th floor of One Financial Center across from South Station. It has since launched a split into three separate companies, one of which — power company GE Vernova — recently moved into a new headquarters of its own near Kendall Square in Cambridge.