Commercial Real Estate Blog

RREEF is moving forward with its sale of a twenty-building portfolio it acquired as part of a larger 120 building portfolio from Peery Arrillaga two years ago. RREEF was reported to be seeking $250 psf for the portfolio, but we’ve heard the price is coming in well below that mark, somewhere around $200 per foot.

The portion of the portfolio being sold is concentrated in Sunnyvale along 237, and represent leased investments. The deal is expected to close sometime in early September.

UPDATE (07/23): Globe Street is reporting the sale at $185 psf ($74M) to DRA Advisors/Landmark Asset Management Group.

It’s been rumoured in the past that Google was nibbling at taking down space at Jay Paul’s Moffet Towers Project. In what could be construed as less than favorable news for Moffett Towers, insofar as Google is concerned, NASA announced today that it has inked a deal with Google for 42 acres of land at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View for the purpose of developing a high-tech campus for Google. Under the terms of the 40-year lease, Google will lease 42 acres to construct up to 1.2 Million square feet of an office and R&D campus. Google will pay NASA an initial base rent of $3.66 million per year. NASA will use the proceeds to cover the full cost of the lease and the balance may be used for capital revitalization and improvements of the real property assets at Ames.

Construction of the project will be in three phases, with the first planned to begin by the end of September 2013, the second phase by 2018, and the third by 2022. Google also intends on constructing company housing and dining, sports, fitness, child care, conference amenities.

In the late nineties, Sobrato signed a ground lease for the construction of its Mission Valley College office campus in Santa Clara. That was a 26-acre piece that they used to develop 685,000 SF of office on. That lease represented about $.147 per SF, per month on the dirt, and $.243 per buildable SF. In contrast, the Google/NASA deal has Google paying about $.164 per SF, per month on the dirt, and ultimately when the 1.2M SF is built out, $.254 per buildable SF.

The Contra Costa times featured an article today highlighting the relatively inexpensive rents in Fremont as spurring demand for space. While Silicon Valley and the Peninsula have seen office rates increase over the past two years or so, Fremont has remained a fairly inexpensive market. Rents have moved up in Fremont, but compared to space just over the Dumbarton Bridge or over Highway 92, Fremont is a bargain.

Fremont is a market which doesn’t have a lot of the Class A type of office space that you can find in Foster City or Redwood Shores, but it does have a few comparable buildings in its downtown area nearby the BART Station. Space in Fremont runs about $2.50 Full-Service for Class A office, while in Foster City or Redwood Shores would run you north of $4.00 Full-Service.

Supply is much higher in Fremont with vacancy rates for CTU construction offices and R&D facilities into the teens and rents 30-50% cheaper than the alternatives on the other side of the bay. Some of the new companies to move into Fremont recently include Solyndra, Super Micro Computer, and PurFresh. Also, the stock of single-story R&D buildings in Fremont is also making it a popular place for cleantech companies looking for a cheaper alternative to space along the 237 corridor in Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, and San Jose.

Cornish and Carey held its annual forecast in Santa Clara this week. Along the lines of what I’ve been writing about, they are predicting rental rates to be static for 2008 for office and R&D, and vacancy rates to remain in a similar state.

The fact is that there is a large amount of new space coming online in 2008. In addition, there remains a fair amount of space available outside of Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Shoreline, and Cupertino submarkets. All of these submarkets will see new buildings come online this year, though no tremendously large projects are slated to dramatically change the landscape. In Sunnyvale however, Menlo Equities, Jay Paul, Sand Hill Property/RREEF JV, and a few smaller projects are bringing online more than 1.5M square feet of space this year alone. That is enough for 7500 employees in a time when most people now see that job growth will also be static if not recessionary this year.

As a result, we believe a portion of the price increases in the past 12-30 months we’ve seen in some of the softer markets outside those indicated above have been in large part a combination of broker hype and new owners paying dear prices for commercial property and being essentially forced to raise rents to make their deals pencil.

I think that while we may not see landlords drop asking rents immediately, smart landlords see the writing on the walls and we’ll see some get more aggressive in making deals.