Editors’ Weekly News Roundup July 22 – July 26
Although there have been fewer large portfolio transactions outside the multifamily sector in the past few quarters, they do still occur. Perhaps it’s their relative infrequency that makes them especially newsworthy. As a case in point, the most-read commercial real estate of the past week on Connect CRE was just such a sale transaction.
Brookfield Closes on $1.3B Light Industrial Portfoliotopped the rankings of our five most-read stories for the week ending July 27. The seller of this 14.6-million-square-foot portfolio was DRA Advisors, and the portfolio spanning 20 high-growth U.S. markets will be integrated with a global logistics footprint that runs to 150 million square feet including a development pipeline.
The week’s second best-read story also reported a sale, but this time it was a single asset in a single market, namely San Diego. That asset was a resort hotel adjacent to one of the world’s premier golf courses, Torrey Pines.
Dallas-based Braemar Hotels & Resorts was the seller in Hilton La Jolla Torrey Pines Trades for $165M. The buyer reportedly was a Southern California-based investor, JRK Property Holdings, which acquired the 394-key resort property through its $350-million hospitality fund. For Braemar, the sale took care of the last remaining debt maturity for this year.
Coming in third was another single-asset story, this time a development project. As reported in Developer Duo Teaming Up on $1.8B Atlanta Data Center, TA Realty and EdgeConneX are working together on a 324-megawatt hyperscale facility in Union City, GA. The end user is reported to be Microsoft, and the three-building, 2.1-million-square-foot project is slated for completion in 2029.
Another team effort on development was the basis for the week’s fourth most-read story, Developers Top Out 58-Story ATX Tower.Here, the developers were Tishman Speyer and Ryan Companies US, who are building a mixed-use project in Austin. Lower floors of ATX Tower will be given over to office space, while the upper floors will be residential. It’s expected to open in the fourth quarter.
Completing the top five was another portfolio story, albeit under less happy circumstances than Brookfield’s deal with DRA. Goldman Sachs, Ballast Hand Over 1,211 San Francisco Apartments to Lenderreported that the Royal Bank of Canada is now the (probably reluctant) owner of 82 multifamily properties that the borrowers had acquired between 2017 and 2020. Call it one of the more dramatic examples of the multifamily distress that experts are predicting we’ll be seeing more of.
Since the launch of Connect Media, we’ve been in the business of producing live events. That aspect of our integrated platform continues to go full tilt, with no fewer than seven events on the calendar for the remainder of the year. Now, though, we’ve branched out into another aspect of presenting events: a nationwide calendar of industry conferences, whether they’re being organized by professional associations or other event companies. We launched it on a national and regional basis this past Wednesday, and you can find it here.