Regions

Three Cushman & Wakefield Marketbeat reports covering New Jersey office and industrial markets depict a state that’s for the most part mirroring the national commercial real estate scene’s uncertainties, ambiguities and contradictions.And although the three reports cover northern New Jersey office, central New Jersey office and the state’s overall industrial market, there are some noteworthy similarities and parallels. The state lost 10,900 jobs in May, which bumped the unemployment rate to 5.4 percent, or just 0.1 percentage points below the national rate. Job losses have been especially heavy in the financial sector. In northern New Jersey, overall office vacancy rates…

Work has commenced on Almac Group’s new North American headquarters campus in Lower Salford Township in Harleysville, Pa., about 30 miles outside of Philadelphia. The Craigavon, Northern Ireland-headquartered bioscience research-and-development services company will invest $100 million to develop a 240,000-square-foot facility as part of an expansion and consolidation project that will ultimately yield an office and production complex of up to 1 million square feet.The new building will allow Almac to bring its employees from offices in Audubon and in Yardley at the Lower Makefield Corporate Center under one roof. The Audubon locale sits about 15 miles south of the…

Westcore Properties has announced the sale of a Class A Austrian office building. The 125,000-square-foot property sold for $39.2 million (24.5 million Euros) to Credit Suisse Asset Management Immobilien Kapitalanlagegesellschaft mbH. The six-story building is located in Vienna’s Wienerburg submarket. The sale of the building represents a substantial profit for Westcore. The firm initially purchased the building as part of a three-building portfolio from Philips Electronics NV in February of 2007. The sale comes after Westcore spent over a year working on renovating and instituting processes to add value to its property. Marc Brutten, Westcore’s chairman, explained the firm’s strategy…

Brandywine Realty Trust has executed a 10-year lease transaction with Time Warner Cable Inc. for 195,000 square feet in South Lake at Dulles Corner, a 268,240-square-foot office building in Herndon, Va, a suburban office market in Washington, D.C. The lease brings South Lake at Dulles Corner to 73 percent leased.Time Warner Cable will relocate from several non-Brandywine locations in the Herndon area and will occupy the South Lake building between April and August of 2009. The 10-story office building is located at the intersection of the Dulles Access and Toll Road and Route 28 in the Dulles Corner office park….

Trammell Crow Co. has opened a new 61,500-square-foot air cargo handling facility at the George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston (IAH). The cost of the facility was not disclosed. The International Air CargoCentre II (pictured) will help move Houston’s growing volume of cargo–up 5.1 percent in 2006 and 5.7 percent in 2007. “As a natural gateway to Central and South America, Houston is primed for air cargo growth,” Jeremy Garner, vice president working out of Trammell Crow’s Houston office, told CPN today. In recent years, China, Korea and Taiwan have opened cargo routes through Houston, Garner continued. Now airport marketers…

Following unanimous approval by the seven members of the Palm Beach County Board of County Commissioners, Germany’s Max Planck Society is moving forward with its plan to establish an institute in the United States. The County approved the allocation of $86.9 million to build and operate a 100,000-square-foot biomedical research facility called the Max Planck Florida Institute. It will be located on six acres at Florida Atlantic University’s (FAU) MacArthur campus in Jupiter. The total value of the agreement with the county and partners in the deal, including FAU, is $94 million, with a 50-year sub-lease on land worth approximately…

Laramar Group has opened a California office, based in Irvine, and hired Greg Campbell as vice president of acquisitions, the company said today. Located at 8001 Irvine Center Drive, the office will pursue value-add multi-family assets throughout the state . Laramar’s first acquisition out of the new office represents the largest Bay Area apartment purchase in 2008. Located at 355 Kiely Boulevard, the 948-unit, garden-style Archstone San Jose will be renamed The Park Kiely.  The 31-building property comprises of two- and three-story garden-style apartments, a clubhouse, fitness center, three tennis courts, five swimming pools, a sauna and sand volleyball courts,…

It’s been a long time coming, but San Francisco’s Transbay Terminal is set to break ground this year. Ultimately, the plans to redevelop a blighted and underutilized transit terminal and dilapidated area promise to bring extended rail access, jobs, housing and other real estate uses to the city, according to Transbay Joint Powers Authority executive director Maria Ayerdi-Kaplan, who presented the keynote address at CPN’s San Francisco Property Opportunities conference yesterday. The authority signed architect Cesar Pelli to design the transit center in mid-May. The multi-phase project got its beginnings in 1999, when the approval of Proposition H made it…

ProLogis is developing its first distribution facilities in Austria, the company said today. The firm has started construction on the first of two planned distribution centers that will comprise ProLogis Park Himberg, a new industrial park located outside of Vienna, in close proximity to the S1 highway. ProLogis expects to complete the 352,000-square-foot  facility in early 2009.”Our recent entry into Austria is part of our global strategy to provide our customers with exceptional distribution services and space that meets their expansion and reconfiguration needs,” Christian Bischoff, managing director of ProLogis in northern Europe said in a release. “We have been investigating…