Progress in Downtown Gardner – Interview with Jon Bombaci on March 18, 2024
We had the honor of speaking with Jon Bombaci of Candor Realty on March 18, 2024. The reason was some big news happening in the Bull Nose Building at 25 Main Street, the arrival this summer or fall of a brand new Coffee Shop, Restaurant, and Bakery. It will be the third location for Brilla who currently operate in Holden and Northborough. The spot will be about 3500 – 4000 square feet upon completion is planned to be by October or sooner. Listen to the complete interview on any device. CLICK PLAY.
Bombaci stated, “They’re a great, great established coffee shop, but they’re going to be launching a full-scale restaurant in the building, complete with a whole bunch of other things that they’re experimenting with down in their Holden location. So we’re excited…. so I think they’re going to go from breakfast all the way through dinner. They’re planning to serve alcohol. They’re planning to kind of be open for whatever it is you want, and having a changing menu from breakfast, lunch, to dinner. They’re already experimenting with this in Holden, and they found some success at it, and so we’re kind of looking forward to helping them launch full service, three meals a day type of a space.”
Other plans for the 25 Main Street building include setting aside 800 square feet for Candor Realty offices. The second and third floor are going to be apartments with a total of 14 units of mostly two bedroom units. Press Release from Candor Realty regarding Brilla.
The Garbose Building
Bombaci spoke about progress on the building. “ We’re working on a couple of leases, but should have announcement over a business moving into what is 8 Parker. That will kind of complete the ground floor. Upstairs, the framing is going on, but we’re kind of at a little bit of a stop where the buildings require a tremendous amount of electricity, which makes sense. And so the holdup at the moment is we’re working with National Grid on sourcing power.” The issue is that with using more electricity to heat and cool, National Grid needs to provide a new transformer. There’s actually a shortage of transformers nationwide which is holding up building. Aside from rough framing and inspections, they will wait “until we can get a firm timeline from National Grid on when we’ll be able to energize the building.” We found an excellent article from Builder on this Nationwide issue, CLICK HERE. Apparently, the shortage of transformers has even slowed down the completion of single family homes.
Other Buildings
82-84 Main Street, a vacant commercial building. “There’s two spaces there that we’re working on filling, and then there’s a basement with a walkout to the back, which is kind of cool.” 88 Main Street is where they have their current offices. Work was wrapped up in 2023 at 104 Parker Street where the Buffer Zone hair salon is.
Real Estate Forecast
Jon Bombaci was very honest in that it is hard to predict the direction of the Real Estate market, but “The real estate market in 2024 is ramping up…There’s a lot of people out looking at houses. The buyer demand is there. Rates haven’t come down yet. So that’s kind of kept people in check a little bit.”
Mission of the Company
Jon Bombaci spoke about his company: “Historically, what our focus is value-add multifamily. We like buying two to 50-unit type buildings, fixing some operational problems, increasing the building, make them safer, update them, make them more comfortable for everybody, and then either pass them off to our investors or refinance them and do those types of things. We have a full service team where we do in-house construction, we do in-house property management, and we’re getting to the point that we’re offering those services to other people. So we’ve historically only helped our clients, but now we’re kind of getting to the point that we can help people we don’t know. And so part of our goal is, you know, our mission is to help people reach financial independence to real estate.” Candor Realty website, CLICK HERE.