Here are the news stories you might find interesting today regarding commercial real estate and business:
Strategic Storage Trust buys Mesa facility Strategic Storage Trust Inc., a California real estate investment trust, has acquired a 570-unit self-storage facility in Mesa. Augusta Ranch Self Storage, 9252 E. Guadalupe Road, was developed in 2002 and contains 75,600 rentable square feet in six single-story buildings. The business will be renamed under Strategic Storage’s SmartStop brand. Financial details of the transaction were not released. View article…
Charming Charlie heads to Fashion Square Charming Charlie will open Tuesday – the first location in Phoenix. The store focuses on women’s accessories, including jewelry, handbags and purses. Charming Charlie, a Houston-based concept that began in 2004, is expected to open a second area store on April 20 at the SanTan Village in Gilbert. The Fashion Square store is expected to open at 10 a.m., located on the second floor of the mall near Barney’s New York. View article…
Famous Dave’s opens Gilbert restaurant Famous Dave’s has opened a new restaurant at SanTan Village in Gilbert. John Erlandson is a managing partner of Desert Ribs LLC, which owns and operates the new Gilbert location in addition to three other Famous Dave’s restaurants in Chandler, Peoria and Mesa Riverview. The location at 2206 E. Williams Field Road marks the sixth Famous Dave’s in Arizona and brings the total number of nationwide restaurants to 176. View article…
Yodle expanding at Scottsdale’s SkySong An online advertising company is nearly tripling its space at SkySong, the ASU Scottsdale Innovation Center, and Arizona State University has added six smaller firms to its business-incubator program. New York-based Yodle Inc. said it is expanding its Scottsdale office into 14,296 square feet on the fourth floor of SkySong’s second building. It also will increase its Scottsdale workforce from the 32 employees it has now to about 100 employees, Chief Executive Officer Court Cunningham said. View article…
Maricopa County agrees to solar installations downtown Maricopa County Board of Supervisors has authorized three solar installations totaling 300 kilowatts starting this summer in downtown Phoenix. The board agreed to a deal with CarbonFree Technology and Arizona Public Service to install the systems on the Jefferson Street Garage, Jackson Street Garage, and the county’s Downtown Justice Center. View article…
Safelite hiring 195 for call center Safelite Group, a vehicle glass replacement company, is looking to fill 195 positions at its new call center opening June 1 in Chandler. The 86,000-square-foot call center at 2080 W. Chandler Blvd., eventually will employ more than 1,000, said Tom Feeney, president and CEO of Columbus, Ohio-based Safelite Group. View article…
Rents may go up for CityNorth residences Tenants at CityNorth’s Residences on High Street could be making higher monthly payments when they renew their leases. Najla Kayyem, vice president of Related Urban Development, which manages CityNorth, said the higher payments are the result of losing the first year’s concessions of two months’ free rent, which was spread throughout the year. The concessions were used to fill the 99 apartments when they first became available last year. View article…
Competing interests divide new Arizona town TUSAYAN – This gateway to the Grand Canyon established its first Town Council on Tuesday, the result of a vote a month earlier to incorporate so residents could choose their own leaders, plan how their land is used and control public services. On Wednesday, a process server crashed its inaugural meeting, handing out subpoenas from a lawsuit filed to overturn the public vote and dissolve the council. View article…
Arizona third for late loans Delinquent loans jumped 21.3 percent in February compared with a year earlier, according to the latest Mortgage Monitor report released by Lender Processing Services Inc. Monday. Florida beat all other states with 23.8 percent of its foreclosed inventory and noncurrent loans to active loans during the same period. Nevada came in second at 23.3 percent, followed by Arizona in third, but with a much lower percentage – 16.3. That compares with a national average of 13.5 percent. View article…
New Index Ranks Top 25 U.S. Markets for Green Building Opportunity San Francisco leads the 25 largest office markets for green opportunities, according to a study just released by global real estate company New York-based Cushman & Wakefield, in collaboration with the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance’s BetterBricks initiative, based in Portland, Ore. View article…
Panel not ready to say when recession ended A panel of academics that date the beginnings and ends of recessions isn’t ready to declare just yet when this downturn ended. The National Bureau of Economic Research said Monday that although most barometers show improvements in the economy, it would be “premature” to pinpoint the end of a recession based on economic data seen so far. That assessment came after the group of academic economists met at its Cambridge, Mass., headquarters on Thursday to review mountains of economic data. View article…
Lenders Open to Real-Estate Pain A slow motion train wreck is still a train wreck. Against all expectations, shares in banks heavily exposed to commercial-real-estate debt have been on a tear recently. Losses from commercial mortgages could well be large. Even so, investors are betting they’ll be bearable, assuming banks will book the losses over time and offset them with earnings from healthier loans. But that convenient scenario may not play out for all banks, leaving investors potentially exposed to shock hits from commercial real-estate exposure. View article…
Feel free to contact me regarding any of these stories, the current market, distressed commercial real estate opportunities or your property.