An “expert” is a guy from out of town with a briefcase. The professionals from Seattle Commercial Real Estate LLC are involved in the day to day business of serving our customer’s day to day needs in leasing commercial real estate and investment real estate and it could be easy to lose sight of all of the factors that we need to be aware of to assist our clients in making good decisions
Slowdown in west coast ports
If we were to focus only on the issue of the west coast port slow down and its impact on industrial real estate, we would be missing an important part of the story. A study by a division of a major national real estate company pointed out that the impact was not national in scope. It was limited to those cities with ports, such as Seattle and Tacoma. If we look at this negative it is also an opportunity for the sharp investor to develop alternative uses for industrial real estate
Amgen sells Seattle office property to Expedia and loses $391 million
Is this sale of the former research facility a loss or a gain? (See our background piece on Interbay.) The fact of the matter is that there is more than one answer to this question. Amgen’s sale was forced at a lower price because there were no large square footage users for laboratory space. The demand was for Office Space. This has lead to an economic boom in terms of the demolition of the existing space configuration to convert it to office use. The construction industry profits.
The impact of Expedia’s move
Expedia will spend millions of dollars in remodeling and renovation and increase the number of employees who formerly impacted the site by initially employing 3,000 and eventually building it to 4,500 employees. Multi-family housing and office leasing are impacted. Commercial real estate in terms of service businesses are impacted. Streets, roads, utilities are all impacted.
Amgen’s move has an impact of the growth of laboratory spaces for research.
Amgen’s destruction of thousands of feet in research lab space portends a huge shortage of laboratory space to accommodate the burgeoning biotech industry. This is going to materially impact the existing inventory of industrial real estate and the cost of conversion to this specialized use portends more business for the construction industry.
Bottom line
Seattle Commercial Real Estate LLC believes that you must carefully analyze a seemingly random event. In fact, there are more impacts than the simple story and we need to be aware to assist our clients in making good decisions.
