Block 16, a new 343,528-sq.-ft. property in Bellevue, Wash. is being marketed for sale.

(Bloomberg)—An office fully leased to Facebook Inc. in a Seattle suburb is up for sale, a sign that developers are ready to test demand after the pandemic put much of the commercial real estate market into a deep freeze.

Block 16, a new 343,528-square-foot property in Bellevue, Washington, is being marketed by Eastdil Secured, according to sales documents reviewed by Bloomberg News and two people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified discussing the private process. The building may fetch between $325 million and $350 million, one of the people said.

Spokesmen for Wright Runstad & Co., the developer of Block 16, and Eastdil declined to comment.

The virus has put much of the commercial real estate market into a state of paralysis, with buyers and sellers unable to agree on price. Some deals have been scrapped and many potential listings have been pulled. In the second quarter, office building transactions in the U.S. plunged 71% compared with the same period a year earlier, according to data from Real Capital Analytics.

Still, some building owners are choosing to move forward with sales, betting they can generate enough buyer interest for well-located buildings with high-quality tenants. In the marketing documents, Eastdil emphasizes that Block 16 is fully leased to Facebook “through June 2033, providing 12+ years of stable, investment-grade cash flow.”

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Suraj Shrestha

Suraj Shrestha is an associate at Harborside Partners. He has been taking the lead role on research projects; to develop and implement online marketing strategies for search engine optimization and social media marketing. He is one of the core parts for helping to grow business revenue and the company’s online presence.

Landlords need to educate themselves about the new Subchapter 5 bankruptcy rules as a precedent-setting case plays out in Texas.

Recent revisions to the U.S. Bankruptcy Code might open the door to headaches and heartaches for landlords that rent to small businesses.

In August 2019, Congress created what’s known as Subchapter 5 of the Bankruptcy Code. Subchapter 5 is designed to streamline the Chapter 11 bankruptcy process for small businesses and slash their legal bills, according to Robert Dremluk, a partner in the New York City office of law firm Culhane Meadows Haughian & Walsh PLLC who specializes in bankruptcy cases.

Subchapter 5 went into effect this February. A month later, Congress tweaked Subchapter 5 as part of the federal CARES Act, aimed at helping the U.S. recover from the coronavirus pandemic. A major change in Subchapter 5 that will be on the books till next spring raises the cap on secured and unsecured debts for a small business to qualify for Chapter 11. The threshold jumped from a little over $2.7 million to $7.5 million. “The idea was to create an easier path for companies to reorganize,” Dremluk says.

Legal observers say the re-engineered Subchapter 5 could invite even more small businesses to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization and, therefore, entangle more landlords in bankruptcy proceedings.

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Suraj Shrestha

Suraj Shrestha is an associate at Harborside Partners. He has been taking the lead role on research projects; to develop and implement online marketing strategies for search engine optimization and social media marketing. He is one of the core parts for helping to grow business revenue and the company’s online presence.

“Is office space going the way of retail in five years? That’s what investors are really trying to understand,” said James Farrar, CEO of real estate investment trust City Office REIT.

It was 2016 when General Electric announced it was moving its global headquarters to a smaller space along the central Boston waterfront, away from the quiet suburbs of Fairfield, Connecticut.

Then McDonald’s in 2018 opened its glitzy, new worldwide headquarters in Chicago’s vibrant Loop neighborhood, moving out of a suburban office park in Oak Brook, Illinois – joining Kraft Heinz, Walgreens and other Fortune 500 businesses in a seismic shift of corporate office space to downtown.

And with each of these moves, there were perks: Millennial talent was more plentiful in these bustling districts such as the Loop in Chicago, where the nightlife and bar scene were also strong. Some companies, including GE, found tax breaks from municipalities when they positioned their offices downtown. And reliable public transit systems could seamlessly transport workers back and forth each week.

But that was before the coronavirus pandemic hit.

For weeks now, companies across the country have been adjusting to entire workforces working remotely. Many of these offices are sitting empty, if only to be frequented by janitorial staff and a skeleton crew of essential workers. Zoom video calls are replacing what would typically have been meetings in conference rooms filled with colleagues breaking bread. Recently, Jack Dorsey’s Twitter and Square tech companies both said employees can work from home “forever.” Google and Facebook, meantime, have told employees they can work from home until the end of this year. Many others are expected to follow suit.

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Suraj Shrestha

Suraj Shrestha is an associate at Harborside Partners. He has been taking the lead role on research projects; to develop and implement online marketing strategies for search engine optimization and social media marketing. He is one of the core parts for helping to grow business revenue and the company’s online presence.

Workplace dynamics will likely be transformed by the time everyone returns to the office again after coronavirus lockdown measures are lifted or eased, experts told CNBC.

“The office will not go away, but the need of the office space may reduce,” said Carol Wong, director and head of workplace delivery for Asia Pacific at global commercial real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield. “People will always need physical space and they always want to meet face to face.”

Still, worries over hygiene will continue to top concerns as employees return to the workplace, and companies will need to take new measures to minimize the number of hand contact surfaces. Some of these steps include the introduction of infrared temperature checks as well as the use of facial recognition for identity verification, Wong added.

Wong is currently working with clients in China to bring employees back to the office. She said about 10,000 companies and nearly a million workers have returned to the office so far. The country, where the earliest cases of coronavirus were reported, has been closely watched as the world looks for clues on what easing of lockdown measures would look like, and how the reopening of economies could be.

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Suraj Shrestha

Suraj Shrestha is an associate at Harborside Partners. He has been taking the lead role on research projects; to develop and implement online marketing strategies for search engine optimization and social media marketing. He is one of the core parts for helping to grow business revenue and the company’s online presence.

How might the pandemic change the features of the modern office building?

From antimicrobial surfaces to technology that can scan the room for workers that may be sick, the workplaces of the post-pandemic world will feature a greater focus on employee health and wellness, Triangle architects predict.

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Suraj Shrestha

Suraj Shrestha is an associate at Harborside Partners. He has been taking the lead role on research projects; to develop and implement online marketing strategies for search engine optimization and social media marketing. He is one of the core parts for helping to grow business revenue and the company’s online presence.

The e-commerce giant paid more than the building’s previous sales price. It may still have been a good deal, capital markets experts say.

At a time when most investors are nervous to embark on new deals, Amazon has charged ahead with plans to expand its footprint in the Big Apple. The e-commerce giant acquired the iconic Lord & Taylor flagship building in Midtown Manhattan from troubled co-working operator WeWork for $978 million, according to New York City Department of Finance records.

While at least a temporary recession is now all but a certainty, this deal was in the works long before COVID-19 became an immediate threat to the U.S., notes Eric Anton, associate broker in the New York office of brokerage firm Marcus & Millichap.

WeWork acquired the building for its headquarters in 2019 and announced a lavish, $438 million renovation project to reposition it to office space. But a failed attempt to go public followed, and the company never moved into the building.

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Suraj Shrestha

Suraj Shrestha is an associate at Harborside Partners. He has been taking the lead role on research projects; to develop and implement online marketing strategies for search engine optimization and social media marketing. He is one of the core parts for helping to grow business revenue and the company’s online presence.

Impact investing is increasingly popular among institutional investors and private equity funds. What does it mean for office owners?

While impact investing has become trendy among institutional and large private equity investors, it also “makes good business sense,” according to Eric Enloe, managing director in charge of capital markets valuation nationally with real estate services firm JLL.

Technology and Fortune 500 companies, which are generating growth in office occupancies nationwide, require environmentally-friendly office spaces, and so are driving this investor trend, Enloe notes. And from an office owner’s perspective, sustainability can be a major financial incentive, as it lowers operating costs and increases the probability of tenant renewal at lease expiration.

“All big investors are environmentally-conscious,” Enloe says. As a result, he notes that the line between impact investing and standard investment practices is blurring. “There’s no such thing as ‘non-impact’ investing. It’s critical to attracting and retaining tenants.”

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Suraj Shrestha

Suraj Shrestha is an associate at Harborside Partners. He has been taking the lead role on research projects; to develop and implement online marketing strategies for search engine optimization and social media marketing. He is one of the core parts for helping to grow business revenue and the company’s online presence.

The Internet may be making it easier for residents of second-tier cities to enjoy big city lifestyles.

(Bloomberg Opinion)—For the past three decades, one of the central stories in the U.S. economy has been the rise of superstar cities. As the country has shifted from manufacturing to services, high-value knowledge industries such as technology, finance and pharmaceuticals have become more important.

These industries tend to cluster because skilled workers, entrepreneurs, big companies and funding sources all want to be in the same area. As a result, these industries have concentrated in cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York, which have had enormous economic booms and skyrocketing rents while many other areas of the country are left to wither.

So how can the places that missed out ever compete with a San Francisco or a New York? Some had hoped that remote work would ride to the rescue. Thanks to the internet, engineers or traders or project managers might be able to live in Akron, Ohio, while working for a company based on one of the coasts. But while technology is allowing more Americans to work outside of the office, so far this hasn’t been enough to overcome the need to be close to where the action is. Even as online communication improved by leaps and bounds, superstar cities just kept getting more dominant.

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Suraj Shrestha

Suraj Shrestha is an associate at Harborside Partners. He has been taking the lead role on research projects; to develop and implement online marketing strategies for search engine optimization and social media marketing. He is one of the core parts for helping to grow business revenue and the company’s online presence.

According to a new report from CBRE, strong fundamentals have increasingly made U.S. medical office real estate a favorite of institutional investors, keeping investment volumes at high levels and capitalization rates low this year in relation to conventional offices.

CBRE’s report cites several factors behind the continued popularity of medical office, including a steady vacancy rate at 10.3 percent despite a 10-year high in construction completions in the second quarter, a sustained increase in average asking rents since 2013, and strong demand for health-care services due to an aging population and other demographic trends.

As a result, transaction volume for medical office buildings stands 50 percent higher this year than before the recession, though it has receded from its early-2018 peak. Foreign investors, domestic institutions and real estate investment trusts are steadily getting more active the medical office market. Cap rates – a measure of a property’s income as a percentage of its price – for medical offices have pulled even with those of conventional offices after years of registering higher.

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Suraj Shrestha

Suraj Shrestha is an associate at Harborside Partners. He has been taking the lead role on research projects; to develop and implement online marketing strategies for search engine optimization and social media marketing. He is one of the core parts for helping to grow business revenue and the company’s online presence.

The company was in the habit of structuring some leases through LLC entities that featured no long-term guarantees.

Troubled co-working operator WeWork has structured some leases under LLCs that are not guaranteed by its holding company, which will leave those landlords holding the bag for the free rent and TIs they provided to help get the spaces up and running. The landlords will also be left with vacant spaces, which may be backfilled with former WeWork tenants or another co-working operator at a lower price.
“WeWork (founders) attempted a paradigm shift in the tenant-landlord relationship,” says David R. Pascale, Jr., senior vice president with Los Angeles-based real estate advisory and brokerage firm George Smith Partners. “I believe they overreached.”
WeWork’s unprofitability and its derailed IPO reflect management’s failure to focus on the profitability of the core real estate business, Pascale notes.

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Suraj Shrestha

Suraj Shrestha is an associate at Harborside Partners. He has been taking the lead role on research projects; to develop and implement online marketing strategies for search engine optimization and social media marketing. He is one of the core parts for helping to grow business revenue and the company’s online presence.