Contract furnishings provider, Hightower received multiple awards at NeoCon 2021, including IIDA's 'Best Small Showroom' (under 4,000 sf) and 'Best of Competition' for its newly designed Chicago showroom.
Humanscale welcomes Elizabeth Margles to its Marketing Division in the role of Chief Marketing Officer. Margles comes to Humanscale with twenty years of experience in design, fashion and retail and a background in public relations and advertising.
The exclusive relationship with Kontrol's BioCloud® Technology will provide real-time detection of airborne pathogens such as SARS-CoV-2 to help make workplaces safer as organizations return to the office.
WeWork has signed a lease expansion at Alter’s 20 W. Kinzie building in River North, just one year after taking over much of the space vacated by tech giant Google. An Alter spokesperson tells GlobeSt.com that the shared workspace provider will also occupy the entire 16th floor, an extra 25,000 square feet, and now has a long-term lease at the property for a total of 129,000 square feet, making it the largest WeWork facility in Chicago.
The first half of the year has proven the U.S. office game is still strong, but 2015's banner year will be hard to beat. The volume of office sales completed in the first half of 2016 has dipped compared to the same time last year, according to early CoStar data. Hans Nordby, managing director for CoStar Portfolio Strategy, labeled this latest statistic "a worry" because a drop in transaction volume "generally portends a decrease or at least a flattening in prices."
Despite still strong fundamentals in hotel operating performance, the capital markets environment for the hotel sector has been going through choppy waters this year. A brief review of key investment metrics illustrates some of the challenges.
Tepid hotel investment activity continued in Q2 2016. U.S. hotel acquisitions totaled $6.5 billion in Q2 2016, down 50% year-over-year. Similarly, the H1 2016 total reflects a 55% decline from H1 2015.
Fortunately, the year-over-year drop in single-asset purchases was less severe. Buying activity of individual assets provides a better measure of investment momentum, and H1 2016’s $11 billion total reflected a more moderate drop of -33% compared to last year.
For decades, many of the nation’s biggest companies staked their futures far from the fraying downtowns of aging East Coast and Midwestern cities. One after another, they decamped for sprawling campuses in the suburbs and exurbs. Now, corporate America is moving in the other direction. In June, McDonald’s joined a long list of companies that are returning to downtown Chicago from suburbs like Oak Brook, Northfield and Schaumburg. Later this month, the top executive team at General Electric — whose 70-acre wooded campus in Fairfield, Conn., has embodied the quintessential suburban corporate office park since it opened in 1974 — will move to downtown Boston.
Green building has seen explosive growth in the past decade as more developers and corporations jump on the eco-friendly bandwagon. There are now nearly 54,000 LEED certified or registered projects in the U.S. spanning some 7.8 billion square feet. The trend will likely continue as commercial owners plan to invest an estimated $960 billion globally between 2013 and 2023 on greening their existing built infrastructure, according to the U.S. Green Building Council. The environmental benefits of green building are clear in terms of creating energy efficiency, improving air and water quality, and conserving natural resources. But, if environmental factors weren’t enough incentive, there is more research proving that green office space can also have a significant impact on quality of life and employee productivity.
The 2016 Chicago office market continued to improve in the second quarter, and the CBD’s direct vacancy rate sank 32 bps from 11.97% at the end of the first quarter to 11.65%, its lowest point since 2008, according to a market overview just published by MBRE.
Perhaps the most important events in the quarter were that developers broke ground on another two office towers in the West Loop, bringing the total amount of new space under construction or announced to roughly 4.4 million square feet. But with a sizable amount of this new space already pre-leased, the prospects to absorb the rest without a big boost in the vacancy rate appear good.
When one thinks of a creative office, it’s usually in urban scenarios. Or maybe in places that are technology hotbeds — such as San Francisco's SoMa, Silicon Valley, or New York City’s Chelsea. But, that is changing, and these types of developments are hitting suburban locales across the country.
The green building movement has spent over twenty years focusing on 7% of a portfolio investment – building performance. But over a 30 year period, people inside the buildings account for 93% of a building’s costs. It’s time to unearth this substantial value in sustainable real estate and focus on wellness.
The challenge with unlocking human potential through the building and facilities teams is that these teams have no remit or incentive to improve human performance. It’s tough for long-term benefits from human health and wellness to get the same attention as sustainability, with its immediate impacts such as energy efficiency. Where is the hard proof that a healthier, happier employee has benefit to a company’s bottom line? Enter the WELL Building Standard.
Strutt & Parkert launched new research about London’s office employees, which examines how they work and what they want from their office workspace and wider urban environments. The Office Futures: Workshift survey reveals that occupiers in the coming decade are likely to pursue far more flexible leasing strategies, particularly with regard to their satellite or non-core office space. They will seek to align real estate costs with a volatile business environment, technology that is redefining previously-fixed workspaces and a younger generation, different enough to their forbears, in order to shift long-established working patterns off their axis.
In a time when there's a surplus of available office space on the market, one of Houston's largest insurance companies inked a prelease with Triten Real Estate Partners for 65 percent of an 187,000-square-foot building in Westchase that broke ground in April.
Kansas City, Missouri-based Lockton Cos., the largest property and casualty insurer in Houston, has leased 120,000 square feet in the eight-story Westchase building underway at 3657 Briarpark, said Scott Arnoldy, president and managing partner of Houston-based Triten Corp.
As many of you know, CBRE’s Global Facilities, Workplace Strategy, IT, and Project Management teams have been working together around the globe to implement Workplace360, our new, innovative workplace initiative. Our Workplace360 of offices are powerful selling tools, demonstrating CBRE’s thought leadership and expertise in creating high-performing workplaces. This is our latest office in Los Angeles.
The US national office vacancy rate dropped 10 basis points from Q1 and fell below 16%, reaching its lowest point in seven years since the recession. Positive tenant growth fueled nearly half of that increased leasing, according to JLL’s Q2 report, which shows 46% of leases signed were corporate expansions.
Investors and landlords alike can breathe a sigh of relief—it seems fears of a slowdown in tech leasing were misplaced. At least for now. The sector was one of the largest drivers of growth this quarter with more than 56% of tech leases over 20,000 square feet representing expansions. And those expansions took place both within and outside of primary tech hubs—a further signal the industry is continuing to expand. Financial institutions were the other sector to take on the most space last quarter, said Julia Georgules, vice president of JLL research.
You See The Headlines.
Boston Strong: What’s Driving Wage and Job Growth in the Nation’s Original Tech Hub.
NYC Tech Growth Outpacing Silicon Valley [Infographic] | Built In NYC
Bay Area Can’t Keep Up With Job, Income Growth In Silicon Valley.
Chicago’s tech job growth near the top of U.S. cities.
Austin Ranks Number 1 in Cities With Most Tech Job Growth.
And according to CBRE there are quite a few more cities doing quite well. (Even my hometown INDY made the list.)
Putting negative predictions to rest, CBRE’s Q2 report sees signs of health in the Manhattan and Brooklyn office leasing markets, along with the city’s investment sales and retail sectors.
This dream house by architect and American Modernist designer George Nelson in Kalamazoo, Michigan, could not have come back on the market at a better time. Arriving just in time for Curbed’s Furniture Week, the four-bedroom, 3,500-square-foot home was designed in 1955 for James and Sally Kirkpatrick, whose college roommate Frances Hollister happened to be married to George Nelson—Herman Miller’s longtime director of design.
The Detroit region’s office market seems set to continue on the upward trajectory it has now been on for several years. This is especially true for the once beleaguered downtown, where the vacancy rate among class A properties has fallen from 25.1% to 9.1% in just two years, according to report just issued by Newmark Grubb Knight Frank.
The metro region’s overall vacancy rate fell 60 bps to 18.3% during the second quarter of 2016, as just over 474,000 square feet was absorbed, the firm found. The midyear absorption level of 919,000 square feet was down slightly compared with 2015 midyear absorption level of just over one million square feet.
While the office market in Los Angeles has been slowly becoming more active, the market has poor leasing turnout in the second quarter of the year. Vacancy rates were flat at 19.9%, and leasing activity was nearly half of what it was last year, at 650,000 square feet year-to-date. However, net absorption was positive with 122,000 square feet absorbed in the market. The Los Angeles office market as a whole has declining vacancy rates for the quarter and some submarkets, like West LA and the Tri-Cities market, had phenomenal activity. To find out why DTLA waned this quarter and what we can expect from the market for the remainder of the year, we sat down with Donald N. Noland, senior managing director at Cushman & Wakefield, for an exclusive interview.
Google couldn’t score LinkedIn’s business. But it’s getting LinkedIn’s real estate.
On Tuesday, the two companies announced a large, surprising property swap encompassing over three million square feet of existing and future real estate, including LinkedIn’s corporate headquarters. From Google, LinkedIn is picking up seven buildings, a plan it said will consolidate its staff around its Sunnyvale and Mountain View Calif., offices. The company said the deal is unrelated to its recent Microsoft acquisition.
The Merchandise Mart has a long, rich history (much of it associated with the Kennedy family), but one of its most colorful eras began in the past decade, when the 4M SF building became one of the most in-demand centers for Chicago’s exploding tech scene. The shift from trade showroom space seemed jarring to many, but the results can’t be ignored; today, the Mart is fully occupied.
Office vacancy rates might still hover higher than pre-recession averages, but the outlook for the market remains positive, reports Marcus & Millichap in its Summer 2016 Office Outlook. (Marcus & Millichap is a GlobeSt.com Thought Leader.)
