John McCloud is editor of Industrial Property Journal, from which this article is excerpted.

San Francisco—After announcing plans to raise $95 million through the sale of four million shares of stock, locally-based Digital Realty Trust Inc. launched initiatives to develop 330,000 sf of advanced data space in 10 US cities. The company owns and manages 49 properties in the US, Europe and Canada totaling 10 million sf.

The current initiatives involve redevelopment of office and warehouse space already scheduled for redevelopment at DRT facilities in Northern New Jersey; Boston; Philadelphia; Atlanta; Chicago; Dallas; Los Angeles;, San Francisco; Charlotte, NC; and Austin, TX. According to Chris Crosby, DRT's senior vice president of sales and technical services, demand for high-quality data space is exceptionally strong in all of those markets.

At the time of its IPO, some analysts believed too many investors had been burned by the failure of existing data centers to find and hold tenants. But the company quickly sold 21.42 million shares for a total of $257 million. While the average stock price of $12 a share was lower than the $14 to $16 a share the organizers initially hoped to achieve, the stock rose steadily during the past 18 months to close recently at $24.74 per share. It reached a high of $25.34 in May but began to decline slightly following the announcement of four million new shares.