Worcester, MA Commercial Real Estate
For Sale and For Lease

Worcester recorded 51 commercial sales totaling $243.7 million in 2025, a 30% increase over 2024 and more than six times the 2020 figure. The average sale climbed from $1.2 million in 2020 to $4.8 million in 2025, which tells you the institutional buyers came back. Five of the ten largest trades were factories or industrial warehouses, three were hotels, and the biggest was a $100 million mixed-use building at 16 Laurel Street.

The spread in pricing is what makes the city work for different kinds of buyers. A 283,000 square foot industrial warehouse on Southbridge Street traded at $28 per square foot. The Laurel Street mixed-use asset traded at $364. Between those two numbers you will find storefront retail on Main Street and Shrewsbury Street, professional office suites, small-bay industrial buildings, triple-deckers and apartment blocks, and infill land. Our active Worcester listings are below, and we run a steady book of off-market opportunities for buyers who tell us what they want.

For sellers, the record volume and the return of larger buyers mean the bid is real again. We start every disposition with a Broker Opinion of Value that pulls from these same city records, so you see the actual comparable sales before you decide on a price.

The Worcester industrial market holds about 120 million square feet across Worcester County and Windham County, Connecticut. Nearly 1.9 million square feet of new space delivered over the past year, and overall vacancy rose to 9.3% while the market digests it. Almost all of that vacancy is in speculative logistics buildings over 200,000 square feet, which run 14.2% vacant. Small-bay space under 20,000 square feet is 3.9% vacant, and inside the city that is the product owner-users and contractors actually want.

Asking rents average $10.94 per square foot and rose 4.0% on the year. Older mill and manufacturing buildings with limited loading lease under that number on a NNN basis; modern space with 24-foot clear height asks over it. That is still 30 to 50% under comparable space inside Route 128, which is why tenants from Greater Boston keep showing up at Gold Star Boulevard, Northeast Cutoff, and the Southbridge Street corridor. CoStar projects industrial rent growth of roughly 3.5% a year through 2030, the fastest of any sector here.

Retail vacancy across the Worcester market fell to 3.3%, the lowest CoStar has recorded, on about 500,000 square feet of positive absorption. The construction pipeline is 24,000 square feet against 49 million square feet of inventory, and roughly 270,000 square feet has been demolished over the past three years. The supply base is shrinking while demand keeps arriving, and CoStar forecasts the same 3.3% through 2030.

Inside the city, the demand is food-led. Worcester issued 1,212 food establishment licenses across 848 locations in 2025, more than triple the 2024 count, concentrated in the Canal District, on Shrewsbury Street, and downtown. Institutional money followed: the CVS-anchored Goldstar Crossing sold for $31 million, or $465 per square foot. For a retail owner that is the strongest pricing leverage in years. For a tenant it means starting the search early and being ready to move when a storefront on the right block opens.

Office vacancy across the Worcester market is 9.4%, and the quality curve runs opposite the national script. The 4 and 5 Star buildings are the soft part of the market, at 16.4% vacant and asking less than mid-tier space. Older 1 and 2 Star buildings sit at 5.5% vacancy. Affordable, functional space with parking is what leases, and the average asking rent across the market is $24.94 per square foot. Office absorption turned positive in the third quarter at about 123,000 square feet after a long stretch of givebacks.

The buyers are now the users. UMass Memorial bought the 265,000 square foot Worcester Business Center it partly occupied for $14 million, about $53 per square foot. Webster Five Bank signed the year’s largest lease at 35 Millbury Street. For an owner of an older downtown building, that is the play: sell or lease to the operator who wants to be here, or convert to residential, which in Worcester is a live option rather than a theory.

Multifamily sales were $379.5 million over the trailing year, down 23% from the $493 million year to July that ran 66% above the five-year average, a year led by Morgan Stanley’s $157 million purchase of Aria on the Row and Jones Street’s $122 million purchase of 145 Front at City Square at a 5.0% cap rate. Per-unit pricing rose from $207,000 in 2023 to $243,000 in 2026. Roughly 1,316 new units delivered over the year and vacancy still eased to 6.2%, because absorption more than doubled; CoStar projects it back near 5% by 2028.

The 2026 buyer mix flipped toward local owners while national institutions became net sellers, which is where we spend most of our time: triple-deckers, six-to-thirty unit buildings, and mixed-use with retail below and apartments above. Realtor.com ranked Worcester the number three housing market in the country for 2026, and the rental fundamentals have supported buyers who came here on yield.

Worcester classifies property for tax purposes. The FY2026 rates are $13.28 per $1,000 for residential and $29.06 per $1,000 for commercial, industrial, and personal property. On a NNN lease that pass-through lands on the tenant. Model it before you compare a Worcester building against one in Auburn at $14.24 or Leicester at $11.77. The city’s 1,136 commercial, industrial, retail, and mixed-use parcels are assessed at more than $2.5 billion combined.

Zoning follows the corridors. Business General (BG) covers the downtown and arterial retail, Business Limited (BL) the neighborhood commercial nodes, and Manufacturing Light (ML) and Manufacturing General (MG) the industrial spine along I-190, Route 20, and the rail lines. Overlay districts and the Opportunity Zone that covers the Canal District change what a parcel can carry, and commercial permits ran to a record 2,666 in 2024. When a client is weighing a site, we pull the zoning, the overlay, and the permit history before we talk about price.