Tom’s Recommended Reading for the Week
This week I was able to make a trip out to sunny California. Unfortunately, I was not able to bring back the nice weather. Hopefully this week’s recommended articles can warm you up a bit. Enjoy!
- Tale of Two Cities: City vs. Suburbs – Across the US, corporate users continue to migrate into downtown office properties as they hunt for those younger employees who reject suburban lifestyles. But yesterday, at Marcus & Millichap Real Estate Investment Services’ CRE Forum in Chicago, several executives grappled with this trend at a morning panel, and the general feeling was that the present imbalance between city and suburbs would not last… Globe St.
- The Optimal Office – Though the “open plan” modern office, with its sea of desks, might look like the offspring of a newsroom or a trading floor, it can also trace its heritage to 1960s Germany. There, two brothers who worked in their father’s office-furniture business kicked off the Bürolandschaft, or “office landscape,” movement, which sought to boost communication and efficiency and de-emphasize status. As the idea took hold in North America in the decades that followed, employers switched from traditional offices with one or two people per room to large, wall-less spaces. By the turn of the century, roughly two-thirds of U.S. workers spent their days in open-plan offices… The Atlantic
- The Office Recovery Still Has Legs – This part of the cycle looks quite favorable for the office property sector. All of the key areas of the market are improving; absorption is up, supply remains under control in aggregate, rent growth is accelerating, and investors continue to allocate capital to the sector.That being said, there is still plenty of room to run. The recovery appears to be only halfway through, after all… CoStar Group
- Empty space, full wallet for Loop office owners – Empty office space may no longer leave Loop landlords with an empty feeling.In a sign of improving times for the downtown Chicago office market, real estate company Lincoln Property Co. and investment manager PIMCO are preparing to put the 29-story office tower at 230 W. Monroe St. on the for-sale market, where bids could approach $200 per square foot, or nearly $125 million, despite nearly a third of the space being unoccupied, sources said… Crain’s Chicago
- River North tech leases soften the blow of Google’s goodbye – A River North landlord that will lose Google Inc. next year didn’t search far for two office tenants that could potentially fill some of the tech titan’s space. Chicago-based Sittercity Inc. and Modest Inc., a local startup led by the top techie for President Obama’s re-election campaign, collectively leased about 24,000 square feet at 20 W. Kinzie St., according to the office tower’s owner, Skokie-based Alter Group Ltd… Crain’s Chicago