Record Breaking Land Site Headed Back to Bank

Back at the top of the market in 2007, Candy & Candy acquired an 8-acre development site in Beverly Hills. The price? $500,000,000 – or some $1400 per square foot!
Just three years earlier, the seller, New Pacific Realty, had acquired the site for $33.5M. It was encumbered with a long-term lease to the Robinson-May department [...]

Mountain View Considering Upping North Bayshore FAR

Google has devoured much of the Shoreline and North Bayshore area of Mountain View and now is seeking to work with the city of Mountain View to make the city “a model for Silicon Valley”.
This entails bringing in MUX and residential uses, and increasing the FAR. My bet is public transportation (rightly so) is a [...]

Macklowe’s Back as CMBS Delinquencies Continue To Rise

After suffering some pretty big losses over the past two years, Harry Macklowe is back. This time he has teamed up with CIM Group to take control again of the development site on Park Avenue in New York.
The partnership between Macklowe and CIM will pay off about $510M of debt on the site, which was [...]

AIA Projects 13% Fall in Commercial Construction

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) is forecasting that office, retail and hotel development may fall 13% this year. In July, they were forecasting 12%.
ndustrial construction spending is likely to slump the most this year, 24 percent, and an additional 7.8 percent in 2011, the institute said.
The group expects hotel building to also fall about 24 percent [...]

BAAQMD Seeking To Require Developers to Study Air Quality

The Mercury News reported yesterday on a proposal by the Bay Area Air Quality Management District that could require some housing developers to go study air quality as part of their entitlement process. According to the article, developments within 1,000 feet of major transportation corridors seem to be those affected.
The air district already has a [...]

Government Moving Into Help Finance Construction of Science Parks

A new Senate bill that just passed committee would drive the creation of more science parks around the U.S. Specifically, the bill would allow the Secretary of Commerce to guarantee up to 80% (!) of loans over $10m for the construction of science parks.
Whoa, good thing that. After all, we don’t have nearly enough vacant [...]

Mountain View Increases Density on County Land; Sale Will Be Attempted Again

The Mountain View City Council upped the density on a piece of land owned by the county to allow 50% FAR (floor-area ratio), up from 30%. The 3.6 acre parcel is located at 590 E Middlefield Road.
The county had previously put the property up for bid, but bids came in too low for the county’s [...]

Fairfield Files Chapter 11; San Jose Projects In Limbo

One of the largest developer and owners of apartment communities, Fairfield filed for Chapter 11 on Sunday. Two of Fairfield’s biggest lenders were Wells Fargo and Capmark.
Fairfield has two development projects in San Jose it had been working on, but no word on what the outcome will be following the BK. The two SJ projects [...]

ProLogis and AMB Present at Goldman Conference

ProLogis and AMB presented at the Goldman Sachs Commercial Real Estate Symposium in New York. Despite the risks that still exist, both groups are seeing more reasons to be optimistic.
One interesting point on the webcast was that even through the peak, there were not that many large industrial portfolios that were backed by CMBS, and [...]

101 Wachovia Branches To Close in California

The digestion of Wachovia by Wells Fargo is underway and as part of the process, Wells Fargo will be closing 101 California branches. In addition, 65 existing Wachovia branches will be rebranded. In Santa Clara County, the three branches to be rebranded include:

Berryessa Rd and Sandstone Ln, San Jose
Stanford Shopping Center, Palo Alto
Bollinger Rd and [...]