REVERE, Mass. — (The Real Reporter) – The rotary where Routes 60 and 107 traffic relentlessly engages at Broadway—often literally—boasts a lush grassy center and floral message greeting visitors to seaside Revere. Open ocean along its storied public beach and Belle Isle’s nature preserve are further venues for verdant vistas throughout this North Shore city of nearly 60,000 year-round denizens.
Conversely, a few hundred yards north of the greenscaped rotary one large section of town projects a less bucolic backdrop. Running perpendicular to Route 60 at the first intersection past the rotary, Charger Street travels behind landmark Northgate Plaza where a dusty gauntlet of aging industrial buildings and warehouses dead-ends at 320 Charger St., where equipment leasing giant Caruso Companies has held court for over four decades, with one portion of 1.6 acres bought in winter 1984 for $550,000.
Baranof Holdings of Dallas
Long on function and short on form, the cluster of largely unimproved lots does offer one stunning outlier, comprising 340 Charger St. that Texas investor Baranof Holdings has just ponied up $20 million to acquire, a self-storage warehouse that Caruso built seven years ago. Baranof’s purchase to kick off the third quarter was backed by an unlikely lender who committed $12.8 million: ExtraSpace Storage, the Utah-based self-storage heavyweight which anchors Baranof’s other regional assets such as 1450 Boston Providence Highway in Norwood. The mortgage is a short-term instrument expiring in June 2028, apparently with interest only terms, according to registry of deeds documents.
Calls to Caruso Companies President/CEO Ralph Caruso and Baranof principals were not returned as of press deadline. According to its website, the Dallas-based fund launched in 2015 is “100 percent self storage” and through a combination of ground-up development and acquisitions, has assembled over 90 properties in 21 states since co-founders Andrew Aiken and Andrew Hendricks launched the platform 10 years ago schooled by stints at such entities as Rosewood Property Co. and Behringer Harvard for Hendricks, who focuses on “sourcing and transaction executions” with Aiken previously managing investments and operations at family office and institutional firms including The Carlyle Group, which as with Behringer Harvard has a lengthy history of activity in metropolitan Boston.
Baranof Holdings is no stranger to Massachusetts, either. According to the website, its 20 self-storage developments projects “have an emphasis on high barrier to entry and coastal gateway markets. Sound familiar? The group which owns mid-Atlantic assets up into northern New Jersey and Long Island paid $18.2 million in spring 2019 for the Norwood property and in November 2021 acquired an Extra Space Storage asset at 54 Montvale Ave. for $27.5 million from homegrown Jumbo Capital which developed the 122,300-SF facility just off Interstate 93 near the I-95/Route 128 cloverleaf. Baranof purchased that 122.500-SF property completed in 2020 with more conventional financing of $17 million from Cambridge Savings Bank. It is located only one-third of a mile from 97 Montvale Ave., an older and smaller Extra Space Storage entity the firm owns and also controls a pair of older facilities in nearby Burlington.
While details of those facilities are limited, there is an extensive on-line description of 340 Charger St. which relays that, along with other forward-thinking aspects, “the facility is designed with future expansion in mind, including plans for a one-story, five-bay, stand-alone storage building on the same parcel.”
The existing Charger Street structure has five stories and 122,050 sf accommodating 832 climate-controlled storage units of variant sizes, plus 15 ground-level exterior units, “allowing customers quick and easy access for loading and unloading. A “welcoming” main office “greets visitors, providing a central point for customer service and operations management,” with tenants also able to use a drive-through, climate-controlled unloading bay “that enhances user experience in all weather conditions.”
(Named after Revolutionary War patriot Paul Revere, the city of Revere is located about five miles from downtown Boston. Houston-based Hines recently developed the Revio Revere Beach, a 209-unit multifamily project on Revere’s Ocean Avenue.)
Source: The Real Reporter, a Boston-based publication. News and photo courtesy of The Real Reporter, used by permission. www.therealreporter.com
July 18, 2025 Realty News Report Copyright 2025
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