Transwestern Wins Two Service Contracts for 5.1 MSF in San Fran Bay Area

August 31, 2011
By Barbra Murray, Contributing Editor

It’s raining real estate services contracts. Amid the flurry of multi-million-square-foot property management and leasing assignments being doled out lately, Transwestern has secured two more big ones. The commercial real estate services firm was recently awarded assignments by Westcore Properties and USAA Real Estate Co. involving an aggregate 5.1 million square feet of properties in the San Francisco Bay area.

Westcore tapped Transwestern to manage a group of office, industrial and retail assets spanning 3.5 million square feet in various leading markets in metropolitan San Francisco. Among the firm’s initial acts in its new position will involve the greening of the portfolio by, as Carolyn Perrigo, senior vice president with Transwestern, noted in a press release, “benchmarking the buildings in the Energy Star program and implementing energy-efficiency measures that will lower operating costs.”

Transwestern’s management portfolio in the Bay Area increased by an additional 1.6 million square feet through its new contract with USAA to provide property management and leasing services for two industrial assets in Fairfield. The facilities, 2600 Stanford Court and 5159 Fermi Dr., are single-tenant properties consisting of 1 million square feet and 600,000 square feet, respectively.

Outsourcing real estate services tasks appears to have been a popular summer activity among both real estate investment concerns and non-real estate companies with major property holdings. Transwestern previously benefited from the frenzy when Sumitomo Corporation of America chose the firm to serve as the exclusive property manager for its 1.6 million-square-foot national office portfolio.

The list of the recently awarded assignments by non-real estate players is a long one. Jones Lang LaSalle secured a facilities management contract for the Principal Financial Group’s 4.3 million-square-foot portfolio of employee-occupied properties, and struck a deal with HSBC Holdings PLC to renew the real estate services contract for an 8 million square-foot U.S. portfolio and expand the scope of the arrangement to include 2 million square feet of properties in Canada. CB Richard Ellis got a piece of the HSBC pie, coming out on top in a bid to serve as exclusive global strategic-property portfolio manager for the financial concern’s 72 million-square-foot international portfolio. CBRE also won an outsourcing services contract with Union Bank N.A. for a group of assets totaling 5 million square feet, and a deal with the U.S. Postal Service to act as the exclusive provider of strategic corporate real estate solutions for the agency’s 300 million-square-foot portfolio of owned and leased properties.

Among the real estate companies that inked mega-outsourcing agreements over the last few months is IndCor Properties. The industrial real estate company awarded a handful of massive assignments, including a property management services deal for a 22 million-square-foot portfolio spanning 10 states. And Transwestern emerged victorious once again when Cabot Industrial Properties selected the firm to manage a nearly 4 million square-foot portfolio of industrial assets in Florida.