Like most cities, Miami’s class A office market suffered during the depth of the recession: vacancy rates doubled, tenants gave back space, and many landlords offered significant incentives to close leases. Interestingly, the market bounced back sooner than many projected with leasing activity accelerating. New to market tenants began filling and backfilling space, foreign investment dollars began pouring in, and the market has benefitted from a flight to quality. There has been a real gravitation toward urban submarkets. Business hubs with residential and retail amenities such as Coral Gables, Doral and the Brickell Financial District have fared well despite the arrival of new product. We’re seeing an overall shift from suburban markets back to urban ones, which is consistent with what’s happening in cities across the U.S. The downtown Miami/Brickell market in particular is seeing high demand as the area comes to life as a 24/7 urban district with lively retail, available housing product at all points of the price spectrum, and many of Miami’s cultural and entertainment amenities. Planned upgrades to the nearby Port of Miami will stimulate further activity. 1450 Brickell office tower is now 80 percent leased just 18 months after delivery. The building has attracted many …
Southeast Market Reports
As 2012 begins the Louisville retail market continues to positively move forward. The energy and optimism in the national markets is well reflected in the city with new tenants entering the area for the first time and a variety of locals, regional and national players looking to expand. The greatest challenge currently in the market is the scarce availability of quality space which is hindering some retailers’ entry into the market today and could seriously affect future growth. Fall 2011 saw Guitar Center, Nike Factory Store and Trader Joe’s all opened in Shelbyville Road Plaza in the city’s main retail core, St. Matthews. While the influx of new tenants is positive, the ownership still must re-tenant vacant boxes left by Circuit City, Wild Oats and Border’s Books. Most recently, Anthropologie announced that it would join Macy’s, Sear’s and Von Maur at Oxmoor Mall further solidifying Oxmoor as the city’s premier upscale shopping destination. Mall St. Matthews continues to be well occupied while appealing to a slightly younger clientele. Other new additions to St. Matthews trade area include Mellow Mushroom Pizza, Tin Roof and Bruegger’s Bagels. The biggest news in the northeast segment of the trade area was the $78 million …
Memphis, home of the Blues and Elvis Presley’s “Graceland”, is the largest city in the state of Tennessee with a population of 676,646. Tourists are drawn to the downtown Memphis entertainment district, anchored by the world famous Beale Street, NBA basketball with the Memphis Grizzlies, and AAA baseball’s finest ballpark, home of the Memphis Redbirds, the St Louis Cardinals farm team. Coming soon is Bass Pro Shop’s gaming retail store and museum, which will attract outdoors enthusiasts. With more than 50,000 people working in the medical industry, Memphis is internationally recognized for its contribution to the medical field. Located in the Medical District, is St. Jude Children’s Hospital, ranked the No. 3 children’s cancer hospital in the country by U.S. News, Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital nationally ranked in many different specialties, the Regional Medical Center of Memphis, one of the top trauma centers in the country and the University of Tennessee Center for Health Science. With its centralized location in the middle of the country, Memphis is the home of many distribution facilities and hubs, most notably FedEx as well as other Fortune 500 companies. The Memphis Chamber of Commerce expects to add more than 7,000 new jobs in 2012. …
The Raleigh/Durham industrial market finished 2011 with substantially increased activity within the warehouse sector. Capital markets activity continues to be particularly strong for Class A institutional grade product, and leasing velocity seems to be finding its legs. The increased volume of deal flow is likely to set the stage for continued improvement through 2012. Investment sales activity has been particularly robust during the past 18 months with more than 3.1 million square feet of institutional grade industrial space trading hands for more than $209 million in value. Cap rates for institutional grade product in the Raleigh-Durham market have fallen significantly since the credit crisis in 2008, but have begun to level off in the low 7 percent range. Duke Realty has been the most active buyer of industrial product in the region. Since September of last year, it has acquired nearly 1 million square feet in three transactions totaling $61.4 million, and is now the largest owner of institutional industrial space in the market. Most notable was its acquisition of the Greenfield North portfolio in Garner, North Carolina, for $31 million. Through this acquisition, Duke has virtually cornered the fast growing East Wake market for Class A warehouse space. Leasing …
Raleigh salutes 2011 as a year of improvement and we welcome 2012 with great optimism. In September of last year, Raleigh received Bloomberg Businessweek’s “No. 1 American City” accolade, which is a measure of the “all-around excellence” of a region. The NCSU Index of North Carolina Leading Economic Indicators, a forecast of the economy’s direction four to six months ahead, rose in October, the first gain in the Index since June. All of the North Carolina-based components of the Index improved, with the leader being a 31 percent jump in building permits, according to Michael Walden, distinguished professor of economics at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. As the economy continues to improve and jobs increase, absorption will take additional existing vacant space. The cities of Raleigh, Cary, Chapel Hill and Durham make up 98 percent of the 76 million square feet of office inventory in the Triangle area. With 461,119 square feet of absorption year-to-date in the third quarter of 2011, the market remains positive. Owner-occupant companies had a major effect on positive absorption. In the third quarter, nine of the 12 submarkets showed positive absorption and decreased vacancy rate over the previous quarter. Wachovia contributed to the negative …
Most Tampa Bay-area businesses look forward to 2012 with more cause for optimism than they had heading into 2011. In prior quarters, the positive direction of the market was largely anecdotal. Over the last few months, though, tangible signs of broad-based improvement have emerged, suggesting that the obstacles to a stronger recovery may be weakening. Hiring activity has spread from a narrow set of countercyclical sectors such as healthcare and education to a broader group of industries such as hospitality and tourism, as well as professional/business services. Housing sales have started to pick up and hotel occupancy rates have increased as business travel and tourism rebound. The rate of growth still falls well short of its heady pace during the 1990s and the post-dot.com years between 2003 and 2007, yet 2011 brought clear signs of forward movement. The resurgence of cost-driven relocations of major businesses to Tampa Bay, combined with significant expansions by locally based firms, has been particularly encouraging. The headlines have been dominated not only by news of firms that are deciding to move to Tampa Bay from other cities, but also of existing companies that weathered the storm of the Great Recession and are moving forward with …
Tenants and landlords forge into 2012 confronting many of the same challenges they had going into 2011. Atlanta’s office market still has a great deal of excess supply and demand remains below its pre-recession levels. The entire market has not pushed fully past concerns about properties with significant vacancy and looming debt obligations. Doubts about the broader economy also inhibit long-term strategic planning. The office market closed out 2011 largely unchanged from a year ago. The overall availability rate only fell by 1.1 pp from 26.5% to 25.4% over the course of the last four quarters. ““Vacancy rates remain high throughout the market and the vast majority of tenants have many options to choose from when negotiating leases,” says Andrew Lechter, executive vice president and branch manager of Studley Inc. The U.S. economy has shown signs of minimal gains in momentum and remains vulnerable to a sharp shock such as what has been called Europe’s “Lehman moment” or a spike in oil prices precipitated by a Mideast crisis. Some of the chronic problems that hampered U.S. growth – weak labor and housing markets – remain particularly acute in Atlanta and registered minimal improvement in 2011. Until employment and labor markets …
The watchwords for D.C. tenants in fourth quarter, and throughout 2011, were efficiency and flexibility. While many companies opted to renew leases and maintain existing footprints, others relocated and took the opportunity to streamline their operations. This “doing more with less” approach has proven particularly appealing in the face of political uncertainty and economic headwinds and firms are finding they’re able to save significantly on occupancy costs along the way. Writ large, these actions are contributing to an upward trend in availability and are likely to lower the aggregate demand for office space in D.C. for a long time to come. At the height of the economic downturn, companies were forced to reorganize their operations and create leaner organizations in an effort to reduce financial commitments. This heightened efficiency is now being implemented as a long-term cost-savings strategy and tenants are not eager to alter this new model. The real estate decisions made by law firms, in particular, have been demonstrative of this trend as recent leases have resulted in a net decrease in firms’ occupied space. This is especially telling since new leases typically account for both today’s space needs as well as room for expansion during the lease …
During the last 12 months, the Raleigh/Durham apartment market has continued to maintain a lofty appeal in the eyes of local, regional and institutional investors. The fundamentals of the region, including its growth projections, the diversity of employment and the driving force that is created by three major research universities, has continued to offer good reasons for investors to inject capital into the Raleigh/Durham apartment market. After a slow start in 2010, many developers have set their eyes on taking advantage of the reduced development pipeline that was a casualty of the recession. The institutions as well as local and regional developers with strong balance sheets were those that were in the best position to take advantage of being the first to break ground. After just a few developments started in 2010, the number of new construction starts and new developments in the planning stages during 2011 has exponentially increased. However, number of new apartment units added to the market in 2011 will be the lowest in recent memory. Part of the reason for this increase in development activity is that the investment sales market has been so strong in the Raleigh/Durham marketplace, arguably as strong or stronger than any …
The Raleigh/Durham retail market consists of approximately 41 million square feet and serves a population of about 1.75 million people. Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill comprise the “Research Triangle” metropolitan region, which is continuously ranked among the best areas in the nation to live and work. The retail market has an overall low vacancy rate and remains relatively healthy despite the lingering recession. A period of remarkable growth has slowed and only a handful of new developments opened in 2011. These include Park West Village, a 373,748 square feet power center located in Morrisville at Highway 54 and Cary Parkway, and the 57,511-square-foot Market at Colonnade, a shopping center anchored by Whole Foods and located on Six Forks Road in north Raleigh. Another notable project is the renovation of the 200,000-square-foot Waverly Place in Cary. Few new development opportunities are expected in the near future and positive absorption of vacancy for anchor and shop space has been encouraging, as centers have continued to strengthen albeit at lower rental rates. Job growth drivers are simply not there to support the rapid retail growth the area experienced prior to the recession. Trends in the marketplace include expansion of discount chains such as …