当Carramerica Realty Corp.售出了加利福尼亚州的空置圣何塞，12月份的500万美元的办公楼，华盛顿州，D.C.，房地产投资信托率为220万美元。它在1997年收购了67,000平方英尺的单层灰泥结构，当时建筑物被Comdisco占据了大厦，在科技股票博彩爆发并于2001年7月举行破产保护。不推荐，然而，卡拉姆米卡放弃了硅谷。事实上，它是该地区最可见的买家之一，在旧金山湾区购买了八大办公楼，于2004年下半年汇总了1990万美元。该公司的湾区控股现在是650万平方英尺它的第四个国家组合。
"We have confidence in the recovery in northern California," says CarrAmerica's chief investment officer, Karen Dorigan. "It is happening at different rates in different places, but they're all beginning to come back." Indeed, more than $5 billion of commercial properties were sold or spoken for in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2004 -- better than twice 2003's volume.
CarrAmerica is one of a growing number of institutional investors acquiring commercial properties in Silicon Valley and other "tech-wrecked" markets, including Atlanta; Austin, Texas; Baltimore; Boston; northern Virginia; Portland, Oregon; Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina; and Seattle. The buyers include New York's Teachers Insurance and Annuity AssociationCollege Retirement Equities Fund (TIAA-CREF), the California State Teachers' Retirement System, the California Public Employees' Retirement System and Dallas-based REIT Prentiss Properties Trust.
有健康的恢复已经明显开始。虽然在许多科技市场的情况下，办公室空缺率仍然高于中央商业区的14.5％的国家平均值，郊区的19％，它们比一年前的低价低于他们。
Consider northern Virginia. A few years ago tech companies were dumping millions of square feet of excess space back on the market. In fall 2001, for instance, Cisco Systems put 224,000 square feet of office space in Herndon up for sublet. That's changing fast. In the fourth quarter of 2004, vacancy rates dropped to 13.3 percent, far better than the 19 percent rate that prevailed a year earlier. At the opposite side of the country, the vacancy rate in Portland fell to 13.1 percent in the central business district and 19.2 percent in the suburbs, from 14.5 percent and 24.1 percent, respectively, over the same period.
Office property sales are also picking up. And it's not just revived computer or telecom companies that are renting space: Biotech and defense-related companies are filling many of the empty quarters. CarrAmerica, for instance, sold its San Jose building to RAE Systems, which manufactures devices that detect toxic gas and radiation and sells them to industrial users and defense contractors.
Rents remain far below their precrash high. In San Francisco, for example, class-A office leases were approaching $100 per square foot in early 2001; at the end of third-quarter 2004, they averaged $30.72, reports Cushman & Wakefield, a real estate services firm. Still, it's a nascent recovery, and it could fizzle. "Vacancies are heading in the right direction, but that's about as far as you can go right now," says J. Allen Smith, a portfolio manager of Parsippany, New Jerseybased Prudential Real Estate Investors, which has $23 billion in assets. "Most of what you think of as the major technology markets saw a modest improvement in 2004. But that improvement is not translating into the balance of power shifting from tenant to landlord."
Investment in high-tech goods and services is not increasing rapidly enough to drive a significant increase in employment and hence demand for office space. Robert Half Technology, a Menlo Park, Californiabased recruiter of IT professionals, says that only 11 percent of 1,400 CIOs polled in October plan to add IT staff this quarter. "The recovery has not gained a lot of steam and momentum," says Prudential's Smith. "It's fairly tenuous."
This cycle differs from real estate's slow comeback from the wrenching property recession of the early 1990s. Then, many major markets were glutted with empty towers built on spec by overleveraged developers; subsequent high interest rates and a credit crunch helped turn boom to bust. Many sellers had to unload holdings at distressed prices. But once this purging process took place and interest rates fell, the real estate recovery began.
During the late '90s boom, lenders showed more restraint than they had a decade earlier. And today owners are paying off their debts at interest rates that remain low, even after recent hikes by the Federal Reserve Board. More owners have managed to hold on to their properties. In many cases, they've refinanced their loans at reduced rates; in others, they've cross-collateralized vacant buildings with more stable properties. Thus this recovery has begun on a more solid footing. Sellers aren't desperate, and buyers can't find outright bargains. "In many places holders of assets are really loath to sell below replacement cost," says J.P. Morgan Fleming Asset Management's David Esrig. "And that's a big difference we've had in this cycle versus the previous cycle."
Buyers are out there. According to a recent report by Deloitte & Touche USA and Rosen Consulting Group, pension funds devoted 5 percent of their assets to property investments as of year-end 2004, up from 4 percent in 2003. The issuance of commercial-mortgage-backed securities reached $92.9 billion at the end of 2004, surpassing 2003's $76.5 billion. Real estate mutual funds pulled in $6 billion of net inflows last year.
“尽管您在这些市场中拥有的职位空缺，但对投资者部分的利益仍然非常重要，”Cushman＆Wakefield的投资销售负责人Timothy Welch说。Tiaa-Cref的董事总经理和房地产负责人托马斯加勒特（Tiaa-Cref）补充道，“那里没有大的便宜货，但我们确实看到了进入基于技术的市场的价值。”
In the largest tech market, the San Francisco Bay Area, $5.8 billion in office property was sold or put into contract in 2004, up from $1.9 billion in 2003. The still-steep office vacancy rate is improving: It stood at 17.4 percent in the central business district and 22.5 percent in the suburbs at the end of fourth-quarter 2004, down from 20.1 percent and 25.5 percent, respectively, a year earlier. In Boston vacancy rates fell from 14.6 in the central business district and 26 percent in the suburbs in fourth-quarter 2003 to 14.5 percent and 23.2 percent in fourth-quarter 2004. Sales totaled $4.9 billion last year, up from $2.4 billion in 2003. In the tech-filled Route 128 West corridor in suburban Boston, vacancy rates declined from 24 percent in 2003 to 18 percent in 2004.
在其他值得注意的技术市场交易中：11月芝加哥Reit股票股权办公楼收购了奥斯汀（戴尔家）四栋建筑办公楼的Westech 360，以2860万美元。每平方英尺160美元，价格为23％以上，奥斯汀市场平均为每平方英尺130美元，该房产投资销售研究公司真正的资本分析纽约的实际资本分析具有更多投资者需求而不是可用产品。同期在列克星敦，马萨诸塞州的波士顿郊区，波士顿的TA伙伴资产地支付了3500万美元的190,080,580平方英尺的Hayden Woods办公楼，其租户包括思科和摩托罗拉。此外，在11月，Behringer哈佛大基金会是一家位于达拉斯的达拉斯赞助商，在合同中，在亚特兰大的288,175平方英尺的Ashford鸟舍支付约4630万美元;租户包括Verizon和Noble Systems Corp.
TIAA-CREF直接拥有130亿美元的美国，加拿大和西欧的房地产，在去年下半年在技术市场中获得了几次办公室收购。11月，在与REIT波士顿物业和荷兰养老基金的合资企业中，Stichting Pensioenfonds ABP，TIAA-CREF在Herndon获得了7820万美元的Worldgate Plaza I-IV。四大建筑322,000平方英尺的物业是租户占据了75％，包括Semantec Corp.和Verizon。
“当我们看看北弗吉尼亚州北部的需求司机时，”Tiaa-Cref的Garbutt说：“我们看到了良好的前景前进。这些科技市场只是巨大的智力资本，当你看到的时候，长期前景通常是非常的好的。”圣诞节前几周，TIAA-CREF在西雅图买了3.48亿美元，845,533平方英尺的Idx塔。高科技租户包括卫生保健行业IT服务提供商IDX Systems Corp.。
在许多科技含量高的城市和郊区,生物技术nology is sparking the uptick in demand. East Baltimore Development, for example, is a nonprofit agency managing the $800 million revitalization of an 80-acre section of the city. In December, EBD named a partnership, including Cleveland's Forest City Enterprises, a publicly traded real estate company, to develop the first phase -- 30 acres -- of a new project adjacent to the Johns Hopkins University medical campus. The development, valued at about $500 million, will include up to 1.1 million square feet of life sciences and office space.
Looking to capitalize on the growth of the life sciences sector and also a buoyant market for REIT IPOs, San Diego's BioMed Realty Trust went public in August with a $429 million IPO. BioMed has 32 buildings totaling more than 2.5 million square feet; among its post-IPO acquisitions were the 77,225-square-foot Guilford Pharmaceuticals R&D facility in Baltimore and a 134,989-square-foot building in Seattle occupied by such tenants as Chiron Corp. and Cell Therapeutics.
只有几个月的IPO后，一个更主流的技术相关的REIT IPO在数字地产信托中，在加利福尼亚州Menlo Park，10月份公开亮相时公开了。它的23个属性，大多数数据中心和网络托管设施，总计约560万平方英尺。IPO基本上与私人投资基金全球创新合作伙伴拥有的公共投资组合，是Calpers和CB Richard Ellis投资者的合资企业。
然而，技术房地产恢复的持久实力将取决于科技产业本身的前景。“我们必须担心国家投资者，这个行业如何做到这一点？”指出了J.P.摩根弗莱明的Esrig。“它在爆炸性速度上越来越多，这些市场需要它来追捕一些这个空间？我不认为是。”
Others are more optimistic. "The nature of technology seems to be that recoveries don't follow a linear path, because of the pace of change in technology and how quickly things can move there," says Prudential's Smith. "The market is beginning to show sufficient signs of having bottomed out. So we're looking at getting ourselves positioned to take advantage of the recovery. You don't want to wait until the cow is out of the barn." Especially if it's a cash cow.