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Some key themes recur in the transactions that Real Estate Forum selected for inclusion in our annual Deals of the Year section. Expansion was one theme, and it ties together deals as dissimilar as UK retailer Primark's entry into the US and Procter & Gamble's addition of more than six million square feet of distribution space. Deals that put their submarkets on the map with a single stroke was another such theme. Finally, deals involving multiple transactions, and many moving parts, cropped up often enough that we decided to forego our customary practice of grouping these profiles by deal type (leasing, development, acquisitions, financing, M&A transaction).

Another theme unifying these transactions is a stronger and more active commercial real estate environment compared to the past few years. It's a mark of the industry's recovery from the downturn that these deals span property types, and that we were able to “bundle” a number of related transactions that, two or three years ago, would have been treated as standalone events—in part because there weren't as many deals to write about

NOTE: The following transactions, presented in no particular order, were chosen by the editors based on information gathered from nominations and industry sources such as market reports, Real Capital Analytics and Xceligent, as well as past coverage on GlobeSt.com and in Forum, for deals that have closed, broken ground or delivered in 2014. While every effort has been made to include all parties involved in the deals, some details were not readily available.

LOOKING FOR BIG DEALS? GOOGLE IT

Google evidently doesn't believe in playing small. Already an outsized presence in Silicon Valley, it expanded its office footprint there this past October by the equivalent of the Empire State Building—2.8 million square feet in all. In what may be the largest lease ever inked in Silicon Valley, the company signed on for all of Jay Paul Co.'s 1.9-million-square-foot Moffett Place office campus in Sunnyvale.

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