PHILADELPHIA — Kimco Realty’s Lincoln Square mixed-use project currently under development will be the site of Philadelphia’s first Sprouts Farmers Market. The 32,000-square-foot store is part of the adaptive reuse of Lincoln Square’s historic train station and will incorporate the Gothic Revival elements of the property. Work on the redevelopment project at the corner of South Broad Street and Washington Avenue, began in late 2016. Sprouts is one of the fastest growing grocers in the United States and has opened 30 stores in 2018. Other retail tenants that have signed on to the development include Target, PetSmart, Starbucks and Sprint. The project will also include 322 residential units. Residential move-ins are planned to begin this summer, with Sprouts set to open in the third quarter of 2018.
NEW YORK CITY — Jamestown LP has sold Chelsea Market in Manhattan to Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) for $2.4 billion. Formerly a Nabisco factory in the West Chelsea district, the nearly 1.2 million-square-foot complex features office and retail space, as well as a large food hall on the ground floor that serves more than 500,000 locals and tourists on a monthly basis. The property occupies an entire city block bounded by Ninth and Tenth avenues between 15th and 16th streets. Jamestown will continue to manage Chelsea Market’s food hall and retail component. “I don’t think we could think of a more appropriate buyer and better steward for the asset. We’ve been working with Google for 17 years and we’ve watched them grow from 30 people in an office to now being one of the largest tech employers in the city,” says Michael Phillips, president of Jamestown. “It’s a bittersweet day. We’ve spent a lot of time there, and we love all the tenants. We’ll continue to have our offices there, but I think it’s a good time for Google to step in.” In 2010, Jamestown and its partners sold 111 Eighth Avenue, a roughly 3 million-square-foot office building in Manhattan, …
Office developers in Chicago are thinking outside the box — and outside the central business district — in order to cater to tenants in search of creative office space. While there will always be companies that want the cachet that a business address in the Loop offers, others realize the strategic advantages of urban, non-CBD locations as a recruiting tool. Live/work/play neighborhoods like River North and the West Loop are growing because high-profile employers want to attract a younger workforce that is drawn to the loft-style offices these neighborhoods can provide. This can be achieved either through ground-up development projects like McDonald’s soon-to-open headquarters at 1035 W. Randolph St., or adaptive reuse projects such as 1K Fulton, a former cold-storage facility that now counts Google among its tenants. Yet as rents in these submarkets continue to climb, office users are starting to ask whether they can get the same space for less money in equally desirable locations. For many, the answer is a resounding “yes.” New opportunities While neighborhoods near the CBD such as River West and Pilsen have benefitted from this office “ripple effect,” Chicago’s recently rezoned North Branch Industrial Corridor is perhaps the most alluring and uncharted territory …
Everyone is familiar with the expression “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” However, what most people do not know is that the second half of that phrase is, “but they were laying bricks every hour.” Bricklayers in Nashville are busy people these days, accommodating the demand for new commercial development. That’s not just a metaphor for the developers of record — the utility contractors, dirt movers, pavers, framers and roofers are all busy trying to keep up with the constant stream of construction. With record levels of construction comes the high demand for a skilled workforce to complete the necessary work. We constantly hear that approximately 30,000 people are moving to Nashville per year. However, a large amount of this new workforce via this in-migration are millennials looking to work in the IT or healthcare fields rather than skilled labor. If you were to ask any “bricklayer” what concerns them the most, almost assuredly the recruitment and retention of qualified labor will be at the forefront of the conversation. With the younger generation less likely to enter the blue collar workforce, why in 2017 did we see 6 million square feet of industrial warehouse space delivered? Make no mistake, that …
Eight years into the recovery, Raleigh-Durham’s office market conditions remain decidedly in favor of landlords, but increased construction following years of limited development activity is at last providing much needed new leasing opportunities for tenants. While a combination of factors, including new construction, drove office vacancy higher by the second half of 2017, the market began the year with the tightest Class A leasing market witnessed since the dot-com boom. Class A vacancy bottomed out in the first quarter of 2017 at 9.1 percent, down from a cyclical peak of 17.6 percent in the third quarter of 2009, and the lowest level since fourth-quarter 2000. Class A vacancy rose to 11 percent in the third quarter of 2017 as a wave of new deliveries hit the market. Total vacancy ended the third quarter at 13.5 percent, up 70 basis points year-over-year. It is worth noting that this figure includes a handful of large, formerly corporate-owned facilities in the Interstate 40/Research Triangle Park (RTP) submarket. Originally constructed for single tenants such as GlaxoSmithKline, Dupont and Reichold, these facilities are likely to need substantial retrofitting to achieve lease-up. While they are certainly a factor in the market, they are not an option …
LAWRENCE, MASS. — An affiliate of Trinity Financial has received $17.1 million in financing for the development of an affordable housing community in Lawrence. MassHousing has provided a $14 million conduit bridge loan, $1.2 million in permanent financing and $1.9 million in workforce housing funds for the project. Trinity Financial will transform the former Van Brodie Mill into a 102-unit mixed-income housing community. Designed by ICON Architecture, the property will contain eight studio apartments, 25 one-bedroom apartments, 56 two-bedroom apartments and 13 three-bedroom apartments. Aberthaw Construction is the contractor and Trinity Management will manage the completed property. The adaptive reuse project will preserve the historic former mill, while remediating a brownfield site. Constructed in 1919 by the Arlington Mills company, the Van Brodie Mill originally manufactured yarn for wool and flannel. By the 1950s, the Arlington Mills company has closed and the Van Brodie Mill was operated by a company that shifted production to food products, including packaged breakfast cereals and rations for the military.
ATLANTA — Granite Properties has formed a long-term partnership with Third & Urban for the recapitalization and development of two warehouse properties in Atlanta’s West Midtown district. The partnership will create a portfolio to include the recapitalization of Complex, an adaptive reuse project Third & Urban unveiled in December 2016. The building is 80 percent leased to tenants including Proof of the Pudding, Bold Monk Brewing, Look Listen and LTX Solutions. The project is on track to be fully leased by June. In addition, the partnership will acquire and develop a group of warehouses located at 1218 and 1236 Menlo Drive, also in the West Midtown district. Similar to Complex, the new development — dubbed Inland Tract — will offer creative flex space for tenants that need both office and warehouse space.
ORANGE, CALIF. — Chapman University has received approval for the adaptive reuse of a historic packing house. The university will develop a 402-bed student housing community adjacent to its campus in Orange. The historic Villa Park Orchards Association Packing House will be converted into a museum, student services center and classrooms or offices for the university. The new student housing development will target upperclassmen, and is being designed to reflect the character of the packing house and the surrounding community. The project’s designers are Togawa Smith Martin Inc. and AC Martin. KTGY Architecture + Planning is the university’s design advisor and project representative, and has helped to ensure project consistency, coordinate with various design firms, provide design recommendations and shepherd the project through the approval process. Additional details and a planned completion date have yet to be announced.
The Detroit metropolitan area has experienced significant economic growth in recent years, fueled by a strengthening auto industry as well as the continued diversification of the local employment landscape. The hotel sector is benefitting from existing employers expanding operations locally and new entrants to the market. The Big Three automakers continue to invest in the region, while companies like e-commerce giant Amazon.com Inc. are building large warehouse facilities. Revenue gains for hotels were accordingly robust during the 2010–2016 period. Revenue per available room (RevPAR) during that stretch grew nearly 71 percent, rising from a low of roughly $38 in 2009 at the depths of the Great Recession to over $64 by year-end 2016. Both the average daily rate (ADR) and occupancy have posted consistent gains since 2010. Moreover, hoteliers sold a record number of room nights in the city of Detroit in 2016, according to STR. Occupancy levels approached 70 percent by the end of 2016, with ADRs of nearly $150 in the central business district (CBD). The data for 2017 show a relatively stable occupancy level with robust gains in ADR. The record performance achieved in this expansionary period has spurred tremendous hotel development in the downtown core and …
A decade ago, the Atlanta retail market was a house of cards. It was clear to see this if you were in the industry at the time, and possibly even if you weren’t. Based on the intense overbuilding that had taken place, it wouldn’t have taken a worldwide economic meltdown to wreck it, though that didn’t help. Literally hundreds of unanchored retail centers had cropped up all over suburbia, fitting directly into everything that people consider to be negative about shopping centers. The formula for developers was to scrape every tree from a piece of land, cover it with asphalt and an inexpensively constructed building, then fill it with whatever tenants they could find. The result was largely a glut of properties with poor intrinsic values: mid-block sites, odd shaped layouts, challenging access, uninspired, non-credit tenants with high rents. This would, of course, turn out to be unsustainable. To be fair, not every property was developed in this fashion. Atlanta was and still is home to many excellent retail developers that know how to create amazing projects. But many look back to the 2000s in Atlanta as a time of cookie cutter development with inexperienced builders playing a game of …