BEDMINSTER, NJ-Locally based owner and developer Advance Realty Group has formed a new division dubbed Advance Real Estate Solutions, which will be headed up by Don Slaght, co-founder and executive vice president of Workstage, a national design-build development firm that developed more than 30 high-performance buildings and campuses between 2000 and 2009 for corporations including ADP, PayPal, Northrop Grumman, Cox Communications and Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines.

The new division of the company that will provide corporations, building owners and investors with a comprehensive platform of real estate solutions by leveraging Advance's development, leasing and investment teams on new development and redevelopment projects. The division also has the ability to invest in projects, including those where a development project is inadequately funded or an investor is looking for a new operating partner.

"If you think about the market today, we should all be tap dancing to work because there are such low interest rates," says Slaght. "But for the past 15 years we've been experiencing these micro-economic cycles that don't run to historical term, which leads to a lot of dislocations in various sectors including employment and finance." This is on top of significant global uncertainty, he adds. "Then, you think of commercial real estate, with $3 trillion-plus of debt and a constrained lending market, and it throws your traditional operating procedures into a significant state of flux." On the corporate side, he continues, "The past few years of rightsizing and downsizing have led clients to seek a lot of flexibility in the way they plan for their future. What they need is someone that can come in and analyze their situation." Slaght says that the company is capable of bringing in all of the resources required to analyze a corporate situation, including development, investment, leasing and management, "but we also bring capital," he says.