More luxury condos planned for along the Greenway

An artist’s rendering of the condo building planned for India Street on the edge of the Greenway.Hacin + Associates

One of the last surface parking lots along the Rose Kennedy Greenway could soon be sprouting condos.

Development firm Boston Residential Group closed Wednesday on a $12.7 million deal to buy a triangle-shaped parcel where India Street meets the Greenway, along with 30 spaces in a nearby garage. The site’s been a patch of asphalt since the 1950s, though its prior owner received city permits in 2014 for a 12-story condominium project that never came to fruition.

But now it’s time to build, Boston Residential CEO Curtis Kemeny said. He’s planning a 12-story building, with 30 units, with about 71,000 square feet in all. Because that’s what the existing permits call for, the project will need only minimal additional approvals from the city, Kemeny said. That means he can break ground next summer, with a goal of opening the building in 2022.

Alongside the relatively new Boulevard building next door, the condo complex will fill a gap at a key stretch of the Greenway and further knit the park into downtown. Boston Residential is planning a restaurant on the ground floor, which Kemeny hopes will help to bring more life to a somewhat forlorn block.

“This is the last great site on the Greenway,” he said.

It won’t be cheap to have an address in the new building. Units will be priced starting at more than $2 million. But the condos will be relatively large for downtown, with three-bedroom units sized at between 1,500 and 2,200 square feet. Kemeny said he’s targeting a demographic of well-off families, couples, and empty-nesters who want to live downtown but not in a high-rise.

“We’ve looked at the data pretty carefully and we don’t see a lot of this on the market,” he said. “Everybody’s playing small ball.”

Regardless of size, the developer is mining a downtown condo market that is proving to be quite deep. The average price per square foot for luxury condos downtown has climbed 14 percent over the last year, according to a recent report from brokerage firm Douglas Elliman. That’s far faster than the region’s housing market as a whole.

“Even with inventory continuing to expand, buyers are encountering limited supply,” said Scott Elwell, who oversees Boston for Douglas Elliman. “This is one of the tightest sales markets in the country.”