2000: A Simpler Time

It wasn’t all that long ago, but it seems so far away. It was a simpler time, before the days of Sarbanes-Oxley or Terrorism Risk Insurance or before the recessionary doldrums that would set in next year and halt aggressive dealmaking throughout all sectors of the industry.

Nevertheless, the second half of 2000 was shaped by a number of impressive deals. In the development arena, GlobeSt.com’s opening days were filled with such news as General Motors’ $1-billion expansion of its Detroit Tech Center, Crescent’s planned development of the 570,000-sf Five Houston Center (located, our story reported, “a few blocks from the new Enron Field”) and Mack-Cali’s 1.5-million-sf additions to Harborside Financial Center in Jersey City.While the biggest-ticket leases seemed to be signed by law firms, the 1.1-million-sf deal inked by what was then Chase Manhattan, which bailed from Manhattan in favor of Jersey City’s Newport Center, certainly was a second-half eye-catcher. The transaction not only underscored the war between the states but also the relative benefits of out-of-town cost efficiencies as well.

It was an interesting year for bellwether stories on the state of the industry, and not all, frankly, were meant as such. There was the report that Project Octane (remember that?) was set to roll out new technology platforms by 2002. Others were more accurately prophetic such as our report of predictions that the entire dot-com field was about to run out of gas (“chaos and carnage,” was how one pundit characterized it).