The New York firm that has spearheaded Baltimore's largest development for the last three years has left the partnership.
MAG Partners announced Friday it is moving on from the 235-acre Baltimore Peninsula project, though it didn't detail the circumstances of its departure. The Baltimore Banner reports that the site's owners decided not to renew their contract with the developer.
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The owners, Kevin Plank's Sagamore Ventures and a division of Goldman Sachs, selected MAG Partners and San Francisco-based MacFarlane Partners to lead the project in 2022, replacing Weller Development Partners. MacFarlane has also left the team, a spokesperson for the firm confirmed to Bisnow.
MAG Partners CEO MaryAnne Gilmartin has been the public face of the project since 2022, and under her leadership, the development team opened two apartment buildings, an extended-stay hotel, an office building and a three-building mixed-use complex with a food hall.
"Baltimore Peninsula represents some of the best work we’ve ever done," Gilmartin wrote in a LinkedIn post Friday. "From the start, our team poured its heart and soul into helping shape a new chapter for this remarkable city."
The project has landed some notable office tenants in recent years, including CFG Bank's headquarters, accounting giant PwC, commercial real estate brokerage Newmark and design firm Ayers Saint Gross. It is also home to the headquarters of Under Armour, the apparel firm Plank founded.
The team boasts that Baltimore Peninsula has captured 67% of the city's office leasing activity this year.
But Gilmartin told Bisnow in August she wasn't sure the project would be able to generate enough demand for the 14M SF of mixed-use development ultimately planned, especially given the challenging market for financing commercial development.
“It's a risk-off situation,” Gilmartin said in August. “Most people are just not doing development right now.”
To help jump-start activity, Gilmartin had said she was considering using part of the site for data centers and another part for townhouses.
It isn't clear what the next steps for the project entail now that MAG has exited. The Baltimore Peninsula owners said in a statement to the Baltimore Business Journal that that they were "grateful to the MAG Partners team for their dedication and leadership over the past three years" but are now working to identify new partners to lead future phases.
Plank has been advancing a vision for the underutilized waterfront site, formerly called Port Covington, for more than a decade.
The project was initially led by Plank's Sagamore Development, which secured a $660M tax increment financing deal with the city in 2016. In 2017, Sagamore brought on Weller and secured a $233M investment from Goldman Sachs. That team oversaw the groundbreaking of the project's first phase in 2019.
But the team had struggled to generate commercial leasing momentum, and in 2022 it was replaced by MAG and MacFarlane. That same year, the team rebranded the project from Port Covington to Baltimore Peninsula.
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