Investing in Seattle Institutions

Recent posts on Sweet Digs Seattle:
Block party your way across Seattle

Recent posts of interest on Sweet Digs Bay Area:
Five Trends to Watch to Predict Real Estate Market Movement 

The New York Times just did a great piece that helps explain the building boom in downtown Seattle. Evidently, the Seattle institutional real estate market is “one of the strongest in the country” according to  Principal, the country’s fourth-biggest institutional real estate manager. The housing market logically follows the institutional market at both are driven by similar factors – jobs and businesses driving the local economy.

Seattle is now on every investor’s shopping list. This year, the city was deemed the best place in the country to buy and sell office buildings in the Urban Land Institute’s annual survey of real estate professionals. Office vacancies are at a six-year low of 7.7 percent, and downtown landlords are getting as much as $50 a square foot annually, according to Grubb & Ellis, a real estate brokerage firm.

Booming trade with Asia and a recovery in the job market are the secrets behind the rosy office market. Blue-chip companies like Starbucks, Amazon.com and Microsoft call the Seattle area home and have been steadily hiring thousands of new workers and funneling millions into the local economy. Boeing demoralized the city when it moved its headquarters to Chicago a few years ago, but it still has extensive production operations in the area.