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Arthur Sullivan walks down a 100-yard hallway during a tour of Brady Sullivan’s China Mill project in Allenstown.
Shane Brady, left, and Arthur Sullivan stand in the parking lot at their Lofts at Mill West complex on McGregor Street in Manchester last week. The real estate development partners are flanked by their (and the state’s) two tallest properties in the distance — Brady Sullivan Plaza at 1000 Elm St. on the left, and City Hall Plaza at 900 Elm St. on the right.
With the law firm of Sheehan Phinney, attorney Brad Cook has been a tenant at 1000 Elm St. for 50 years.
Dan Baker of Manchester carries his son, Dominic, as they walk down Elm Street past Brady Sullivan Plaza at 1000 Elm St. in Manchester.
Arthur Sullivan gives a tour of a top floor corner unit at the China Mill project in Allenstown.
Brady Sullivan’s headquarters are in the Jefferson Mill at 670 N. Commercial St., one of the company’s most valuable properties.
With the law firm of Sheehan Phinney, attorney Brad Cook has been a tenant at 1000 Elm St. for 50 years.
Barry Donohoe takes a measurement of a window during a tour of Brady Sullivan’s China Mill project in Allenstown.
Arthur Sullivan gives a tour of a unit that is being converted to residential at 1000 Elm Street in Manchester.
Arthur Sullivan gives a tour of the former office spaces that are being converted to apartments in the Brady Sullivan Plaza at 1000 Elm St. in Manchester.
Barry Donohoe takes a measurement of a window during a tour of Brady Sullivan’s China Mill project in Allenstown.
Arthur Sullivan walks down a 100-yard hallway during a tour of Brady Sullivan’s China Mill project in Allenstown.
MANCHESTER - Arthur Sullivan walked through the metal skeleton of apartments under construction where a wealth management firm had operated on the 12th floor of the once-bustling black skyscraper.
“All of us builders are changing downtown into a new place,” said Sullivan, 63, from a corner unit in Brady Sullivan Plaza at 1000 Elm St.
But no builder has been a bigger force than Brady Sullivan — owner of the state’s two tallest buildings and about 60 properties in Manchester alone valued by the city at about $220 million.
That amounts to a yearly property tax bill of about $3.9 million.
“I’d say they’re the largest taxpayer in the city,” said Robert Gagne, who chairs the city’s board of assessors.
Neither Sullivan nor partner Shane Brady, 52, of Candia could say how much they owned in Manchester.
With the state needing 20,000 new housing units to meet demand, Brady Sullivan has looked to repurpose vacant spaces: a former textile mill in Allens-town, a corporate headquarters building in Merrimack and the downtown office tower, for 370 apartments in all.
Helping solve the state’s housing shortage will require developers “to look for every opportunity to expand housing, not necessarily in the conventional ways, right, which is what we’re doing,” Sullivan said in an interview at his firm’s headquarters in the Jefferson Mill at 670 N. Commercial St.
That means thinking outside the walls of the traditional apartment box.
“They’re very good at pivoting as the market changes,” said Concord developer Steve Duprey, who has done business with Brady Sullivan.
Not everyone is a fan. Some don’t like that Brady Sullivan owns so many properties, tries to elbow its way to project approvals and tax breaks, and raises rents after it buys apartment complexes.
“There are people who just don’t like watching people win like that at that level of magnitude,” said Tom Farrelly, executive director at Cushman & Wakefield of New Hampshire, a commercial real estate firm that has done business with the developers. “There is a jealousy.”
Brady Sullivan’s headquarters are in the Jefferson Mill at 670 N. Commercial St., one of the company’s most valuable properties.
As a teenager, Sullivan and his cleaning company cleaned stores at the Mall of New Hampshire. Focused on expanding his business to other states, Sullivan left Keene State College before he got a degree.
Today, Sullivan and Brady sit atop a real estate empire whose Manchester holdings alone are valued at more than the Mall of New Hampshire and its anchor stores, according to the city’s chief assessor and a Union Leader analysis of city records.
Their partnership formed 30 years ago.
Sullivan was helping to renovate and prepare to sell properties acquired by St. Mary’s Bank.
“I started selling most of this stuff to Shane Brady. That’s how I met him,” Sullivan recounted.
“Shane’s father said, ‘You know what? All you’re doing is selling stuff to Shane,’” Sullivan said. “‘I don’t know why you guys don’t just put your heads together and do this together,’ and that’s what we did and never stopped.”
Brady Sullivan’s holdings stretch as far west as Illinois and include about 30 self-storage facilities built or coming online soon in about a dozen states, according to the True Storage website.
Brady Sullivan rents about 3,200 apartments, including 1,252 apartments in New Hampshire that are “all occupied,” said Kevin McLaughlin, the company’s chief financial officer and chief operating officer.
“I knew I always wanted to own real estate,” said Sullivan, who bought his first building in 1979. He couldn’t have imagined how large the portfolio would grow.
“No, no, no, but I always kept buying,” said Sullivan, who was Manchester’s 2013 Citizen of the Year.
“They’re an incredibly savvy group,” Farrelly said. “It’s based on a great combination of insight and knowledge, combined with risk-adjusted luck.”
Overall, Brady Sullivan owns about 2.5 million square feet of office and commercial space in the United States, including about 2 million square feet in New Hampshire.
Sullivan said he “wouldn’t want to guess” what his holdings in New Hampshire are worth.
“I think it’s a pretty big number,” McLaughlin said.
“Can we just say it’s a pretty big number?” Sullivan said, smiling.
“I think they’re the most successful developers in New Hampshire,” said Duprey, who calls Sullivan and Brady friends.
The Brady Sullivan name is on several of its buildings along Manchester’s main street.
“People think that there’s a person named Brady Sullivan,” McLaughlin said.
Others wonder how they decided whose name went first.
“I remember we had these logos going both ways,” Sullivan said. “I just think it sounded cool: Brady Sullivan.”
Their strategy for splitting duties: “We divide and conquer, and it really works for us,” Sullivan said.
“He manages more of the residential portfolio. I do more the commercial ... but we always make the important decisions together. It’s been a great, great partnership.”
Sullivan carries a leaner build than his partner. Brady drives a black pickup truck, Sullivan a dark BMW sport utility vehicle. Both were Manchester-educated.
Arthur Sullivan gives a tour of a top floor corner unit at the China Mill project in Allenstown.
Arthur Sullivan gives a tour of a unit that is being converted to residential at 1000 Elm Street in Manchester.
Their business dealings are not without detractors.
Dan Baker of Manchester carries his son, Dominic, as they walk down Elm Street past Brady Sullivan Plaza at 1000 Elm St. in Manchester.
One Brady Sullivan entity is embroiled in a legal fight with dozens of residents at the Devenscrest Village in Ayer, Mass. Residents were given 75 days to move out before the building underwent renovations. Residents could reapply for their apartments at sharply higher rents.
“I would say it’s the ugly side of capitalism,” Massachusetts state Sen. Jamie Eldridge said in a phone interview.
To aid the residents’ legal fight, Eldridge has secured $250,000 in federal funds under the American Rescue Plan Act.
Some residents took small payouts from the owners to leave their apartments but found it difficult to find affordable alternatives and had to bunk with friends or relatives, according to Denise Perrault, a board member of the Devenscrest Tenants Association
“If we fell for that, that’s exactly what would happen for us,” said Perrault, a bus driver. “It’s a housing crisis.”
Eldridge said tenants would have trouble finding apartments under the $1,000-a-month level many are paying now.
“In my opinion, many would go further west or perhaps to New Hampshire,” Eldridge said.
Perrault said the remaining tenants haven’t had their rents hiked yet.
Brady Sullivan hasn’t finished rehabbing the first of the apartments, which they plan to offer to current tenants at higher rates, Brady said.
“The average rent there was $900,” Brady said. “That doesn’t exist in Massachusetts nor New Hampshire.”
In recent years, residents at Cranmore Ridge in Concord also saw a rent hike when Brady Sullivan took over and began renovating the 120 units.
“When we bought the property, they hadn’t raised rents in 25 years,” Brady said. “I wouldn’t say a lot of people stayed.”
Whether Brady Sullivan buys a property hinges on its potential scale.
“You notice a majority of our buildings are larger buildings, whether they’re mills or towers or others,” Sullivan said. “Then we look at the layout.
“So it depends on how the units can lay out in a building. If it’s too deep, it’s not good, so you have to align it where we can actually make good sense of the good sizes.”
Unlike many developers, Brady Sullivan’s army of 215 employees includes architects, engineers and construction crews.
“We’re our own construction company from start to finish,” Sullivan said.
Farrelly said that gives Brady Sullivan “a distinct competitive advantage over your typical developer,” who has to wait for all those people.
“They can make decisions with more confidence because of the quality of the information that they manage,” Farrelly said.
Brady said the team doesn’t target a specific return on investment.
“We never looked at it that way. We just really never had. Maybe we should,” Brady said.
On each project, the team makes ballpark estimates of the costs.
“As you open them up, you find different things, and that’s where we just have to be flexible,” Brady said.
With the law firm of Sheehan Phinney, attorney Brad Cook has been a tenant at 1000 Elm St. for 50 years.
With the law firm of Sheehan Phinney, attorney Brad Cook has been a tenant at 1000 Elm St. for 50 years.
In May 1972, tenants moved into the black 20-story building at 1000 Elm St., then the state’s tallest building.
Attorney Brad Cook was a summer clerk at the Sheehan Phinney law firm, which still occupies three floors. He rose to president of the firm and now leads several groups of attorneys.
Cook remembers Lynch’s department store and Milton’s men’s shop operating at 1000 Elm. Public Service of New Hampshire, now Eversource, occupied several floors, including space on the ground level where it sold appliances, Cook said.
“There was a lot of commercial activity on the first floor when it started,” said Cook, one of two people still working in the building 50 years after it opened.
Just past noon on a recent weekday, no one was in line at the U.S. Post Office branch, a spot that once would have been crowded with downtown office workers running errands on their lunch hour. Today, many downtown employees are working remotely all or part of the time.
Brady Sullivan bought the building in 2006. Over the years, the federal government has reduced its footprint, which used to include the U.S. Bankruptcy Court. By November 2021, the vacancy rate in the 20-story building had shot up to 44%.
“First and foremost, we were happy to keep it all commercial if the demand was here,” Sullivan said. “But we have too many floors, probably vacant for long enough that we felt, ‘Let’s re-look at this and see what else can we do?’ And residential just makes all the sense.”
Brady Sullivan plans to create about 130 apartments on more than a half-dozen floors as well as a portion of the ground floor, including part of the parking garage it also owns. Work is expected to cost about $12.5 million and be wrapped up by late this year or early 2023.
Each of those floors was gutted, since existing walls and plumbing couldn’t be aligned for apartment living.
“Now, we think we’re going to bring this building right up to 100%,” Sullivan said.
A dozen miles from his downtown high-rises, Sullivan works his way through the Allenstown mill’s long corridors and its apartments, with their quartz countertops and in-unit washers and dryers.
The 150 apartments don’t just mean housing for 300 or so people.
The project has allowed town officials to dream about the future of work and the possibility of repurposing the eventually vacant elementary school about 1,500 feet away.
The building could be carved into professional office or commercial space for startup businesses or shared co-working space along with some town offices.
Without the new mill housing, “I don’t know if I would have thought of it as feasible, because you have to attract that clientele,” said Town Administrator Derik Goodine. “You could almost market the two together.”
Brady Sullivan bought the China Mill in 2019 for $200,000 and expects to spend $21 million on the project, which it expects to complete by year’s end.
Townspeople approved tax breaks, so the developer won’t have to pay property taxes on the property’s improved value for seven years under the state’s 79-E law.
Various sources of revenue “all make the difference,” Sullivan said. “These are enormous projects to take on.”
Shane Brady, left, and Arthur Sullivan stand in the parking lot at their Lofts at Mill West complex on McGregor Street in Manchester last week. The real estate development partners are flanked by their (and the state’s) two tallest properties in the distance — Brady Sullivan Plaza at 1000 Elm St. on the left, and City Hall Plaza at 900 Elm St. on the right.
Over the years, Brady Sullivan and its representatives have aggressively pushed their interests.
The company has challenged the values on at least three Manchester properties it owned, at 1000 Elm St., 1750 Elm St. and 300 Bedford St. But it didn’t win two years in a row.
“They’re one of our frequent flyers,” Gagne said in 2018 of the company’s appeals.
A lower property assessment would have cut the firm’s tax bill.
This month, it filed an appeal with the state Housing Appeals Board after being denied a rehearing for its variance request to turn the former Cigna office building in Hooksett into 81 apartments.
The appeal said ZBA members were “hostile to the development of apartments in the town of Hooksett.”
A Brady Sullivan entity bought the 97,250-square-foot building at 2 College Park Drive for $2.5 million last year.
Some ZBA members blamed Brady Sullivan when they rejected the variance in April. An applicant must show, among other things, that “literal enforcement of the provisions of the ordinance would result in an unnecessary hardship,” according to state law.
‘This is a self-imposed hardship,” ZBA member Phil Denbow said. “From the applicant’s own admission, they said they looked at this property and immediately thought apartments.”
“They bought the building and wanted apartments knowing that was not an allowed use,” said ZBA member Richard Bairam. “That is a self-induced hardship.”
Hooksett Town Administrator Andre Garron said the town expects to see between 500 and 1,500 new jobs created with several new projects working through the regulatory pipeline, including a new warehouse and a defense contractor.
Asked whether his town should change zoning to allow residential development in the old Cigna building, Garron said in an interview: “I’m not touching that question.”
May saw another month of record New Hampshire home prices, with the median price rising to $460,000 statewide and $589,000 in Rockingham County, according to the New Hampshire Realtors.
A New Hampshire Housing report this month stated that the housing market was “in a state of turmoil, buffeted by rising interest rates and economic uncertainty that presents extraordinary challenges for renters and homebuyers.”
The housing shortage is hampering employers’ efforts to hire people, including some candidates who decline job offers after failing to find affordable housing, according to Elissa Margolin, director of Housing Action NH, which includes housing developers, lenders, property managers and others.
Margolin said “repurposing of buildings is a wonderful way to make sure we’re investing in residential housing” in New Hampshire. She said she doesn’t mind if some housing developers choose to create only market-rate housing.
“We need a diverse housing stock,” Margolin said. “The issue around affordability is tied to a lack of supply.”
Rents for 72 new apartments inside the Jefferson Mill that Brady Sullivan owns in Manchester’s Millyard will average about $2,200 a month. At least 300 people are on a waiting list.
Sullivan said it was too early to say what rents will be at 1000 Elm St., or at the Allenstown mill.
“We don’t set our prices until the property is done and we do a walk-through and we look at the units, right, and then we’ll figure out what we think the market will bear,” Sullivan said
During a recent tour at 1000 Elm, Sullivan said the building’s units, with sweeping views of the city, will have “one of the highest rents” in Manchester.
He counts Millyard workers as “our audience” and expects many professionals to rent apartments.
“We’re going to bring more people downtown,” Sullivan said.
Attorney Cook said adding more apartments to downtown ought to create a domino effect on housing.
“When you get more top-end (apartments), people in the middle go to the top end,” and others move up to better apartments.
“It should help everybody,” Cook said.
Jim Dattolo, who was sitting in the shadow of 1000 Elm St. enjoying his coffee, said he expects tech and professional workers would rent apartments there for more than $2,000 a month.
“A lot of the problem with downtown is we don’t have affordable housing,” said Dattolo, an engineer at DEKA who owns a home in Manchester.
Developers and housing advocates around the state say that creating more housing requires local boards to be more open to housing and to make decisions more quickly.
Developers often go to local zoning boards seeking a variance or exception to allow uses not typically allowed for a given property.
Keene Zoning Board member Jane Taylor said developers are citing the lack of housing more and more as the reason local boards should permit projects that aren’t typically allowed.
She “wishes that every application the board sees did not try to justify itself on a housing need,” according to minutes of the May 2 meeting, at which she voted against a small Brady Sullivan housing conversion that was approved.
Brady Sullivan also has run into environmental regulators.
In 2019, the company agreed to pay a half-million-dollar administrative fine related to managing contaminated soils removed from The Lofts at Mill West in Manchester. In 2017, two Brady Sullivan entities agreed with federal regulators to pay a $90,461 penalty to settle lead paint violations at Mill West.
More than 40 tenants also sued over lead concerns there.
Sullivan and Brady both consider their legacy building to be the Waumbec Mill at 250 Commercial St., one the company paid a mere $218,200 for in 1996, according to city records.
“Not many people would have done what we did” during those bleak economic times, Sullivan said.
The building, today assessed at nearly $15 million following the firm’s renovations and appreciation in value, counts Amazon’s PillPack among its tenants.
“It’s given probably many, many times over more back to us than we ever put into it,” Sullivan said.
Brady called it a game-changer.
“It was just a big leap for something that size for a couple guys in the place and time we were in,” he said.
Sullivan said his company and Segway inventor Dean Kamen “probably own the vast majority” of the Millyard.
In one deal he didn’t make, Sullivan wishes he had bought the former Citizens Bank building at 875 Elm St., which sold in 2019 for nearly $39 million.
Sullivan said his people were in the office up to the last minute evaluating it, but they passed on making an offer.
“I think we would have liked to have had that building,” he said.
Over the years, Brady Sullivan has donated more than $10 million to more than 40 charities. That includes $500,000 to help fund a new youth and family wellness center at the Downtown Manchester YMCA that faces 1000 Elm St.
In gold letters, the Mechanic Street building bears the center’s name:
The Brady Sullivan Youth and Family Center.
Brady suggested they could go another 20 years as developers, but possibly at a slower pace.
Despite their vast holdings, the partners said they feel more working class than wealthy.
“I thing with Arthur and I, we always have had that working-class part,” Brady said. “We can’t help but be thrifty. It’s kind of just the way we were both brought up.”
“That’s true,” said his partner.
What’s Working, a series exploring solutions for New Hampshire’s workforce needs, is sponsored by the New Hampshire Solutions Journalism Lab at the Nackey S. Loeb School of Communications and is funded by Eversource, Fidelity Investments, the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, the New Hampshire College & University Council, Northeast Delta Dental and the New Hampshire Coalition for Business and Education.
Contact reporter Michael Cousineau at mcousineau@unionleader.com. To read stories in the series, visit unionleader.com/whatsworking.
Arthur Sullivan gives a tour of the former office spaces that are being converted to apartments in the Brady Sullivan Plaza at 1000 Elm St. in Manchester.
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