Each
Wednesday, The Wrap presents a compilation of recent noteworthy commercial real
estate stories from a variety of publications. Below are five stories that
caught our eyes in recent days.
• “Investor
Checkup: Medical Office Sector Continues Healthy Performance” by Mark
Heschmeyer of CoStar.
Investors’ appetite for medical-office properties is growing
ever stronger, Heschmeyer reports. “We are witnessing core, Class-A
medical-office assets trading at or above pre-credit crisis pricing levels,”
Jeffrey Piehl, director of Cushman & Wakefield’s Valuation & Advisory
Health Care Practice Group, told Heschmeyer. “As the industry consolidates,
demand for strategic off-campus ambulatory and urgent care locations is on the
rise.”
“In addition, Cushman & Wakefield attributes the robust
sales in the MOB market to overall improvement in the capital markets, the
performance of the public and private REITs that have flush cash balances, as
well as limited supply of good-quality product available for sale,” Heschmeyer
writes.
•
“SunTrust,
MetLife in $5B CRE Deal” by Douglas Sams of the Atlanta
Business Chronicle.
Atlanta-based SunTrust Banks will provide up to $5 billion in
the coming years for commercial mortgage loans originated by MetLife Real
Estate Investors.
“As the commercial real estate market continues to regain
its footing, we are actively seeking opportunities that make sense for our
clients, SunTrust and our investors,” said Walt Mercer, executive vice
president of SunTrust, in a statement. “This agreement with MetLife, a proven
and well-respected real estate investment leader, satisfied all of our criteria
and we look forward to its potential.”
• “Apartment
Site Facelift” by Dawn Wotapka of The Wall Street Journal.
The Carroll Organization’s recent $225 million purchase of a
somewhat outdated 1,520-unit apartment community in South Florida “is a sign
that some developers believe buying existing apartments will be a safer bet in
the future than building new ones,” Wotapka writes.
Deliveries of new units are expected to rise over the next
several years, but for “landlords who want to be in the busiest markets,
analysts say it may be too late to start additional construction,” Wotakpka
writes.
"Land prices and development costs
are going up, and rent growth is slowing," Haendel St. Juste, a senior
real-estate investment trust analyst with Morgan Stanley, told Wotakpka.
"And it takes two to three years to deliver [new apartments], and the
world could be materially different two or three years from now. Development
risk is much higher this late in the cycle."
• “Heralding
the Return of the Speculative Industrial Development” by Robert Carr of
National Real Estate Investor.
The industrial real estate sector has
improved to the point that “speculative construction projects are popping up in
tight distribution markets such as the Midwest, California
and Texas,” Carr reports.
“Rents
are increasing in markets including Dallas, Denver, Boston and Chicago as available class-A space diminishes,
according to a second quarter market report by Los Angeles-based CBRE,” Carr
writes. “Demand for distribution remains high for both large build-to-suit
properties larger than 500,000 square feet and for large blocks of available
multitenant space in new speculative buildings, according to the report. Both
the Inland Empire and the Dallas/Ft. Worth markets each have a handful of large
speculative developments.”
• “VIDEO:
The Real Drivers for Foreign Investors” from GlobeSt.com.
In
this clip, Bob Knakal, chairman of Massey Knakal, discusses why foreign
investors are attracted to U.S. commercial real estate. Spoiler alert: he says
it’s not because of the relative weakness of the dollar.