CHICAGO—Certain days of the year are more important than others on the business calendar. April 15, of course, is known to all, along with the last day of the fiscal year. Less known, and quite unofficial, is the day after Labor Day, or as some in commercial real estate now call it, Super Tuesday. After a slow summer taken up by vacations, it's increasingly the day that owners eager to sell their properties by the end of the year bring them to market. And investors can finally start to finalize their own plans as they evaluate the offerings.
“Summers are not a productive time to put properties up for sale,” Daniel Cooper, the Chicago-based head of 90 North's North American operations, tells GlobeSt.com. And that's true for many regions across the globe, a key consideration for international investors. Ramadan, for example, the Muslim month of fasting, has begun in the summer for most of the past decade. Europeans typically take long vacations during the summer, and in many parts of Asia, summer is also a time for holidays.
But once summer ends, and only a few months remain in the year, Cooper adds, “how do you reach you goals on transaction volume?” The answer for many is Super Tuesday. “It's a time to do business.”
And he expects the last few months of this year to be especially productive. “We've recently had a lot of uncertainty, starting with Brexit,” he says. That feeling was compounded by last November's election and worries over whether US trade agreements would remain in place, along with other concerns over immigration and political turmoil.
Most of those fears were not realized, and even though the news out of Washington DC frequently seems chaotic, the markets have learned to live with it. “It's really become the new normal,” Cooper says. Therefore, if last fall was a time of worry, leading many to take a cautious approach to buying and selling, now “everyone knows the world is not going to come to an end, and we still have a lot of money to get out the door.”
And Cooper also says a lot of owners believe the market is quite mature, making this a good time to sell. Furthermore, a lot of capital is looking to buy in order to lock in good returns for the long term.
90 North has already had an active 2017. Earlier this year it advised investment partners Sidra Capital and KAMCO Investment Co. on several large-scale transactions in OH. The first acquisition was a 215,000 square foot class A office building in Easton, a Columbus suburb, that Abbott Nutrition Products uses as its headquarters. The second transaction was the $84.5 million acquisition of the 368,447 square foot corporate headquarters for Mercy Health in suburban Cincinnati. The newly-developed, five-story office building is located approximately 10 miles from downtown in the city's Bond Hill neighborhood.
90 North also has big plans for the rest of the year, Cooper says. It's poking around several other CBDs, and may complete around three or four additional deals. “I can see us investing up to half a billion dollars before the year's end.”
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Brian J. Rogal
Brian J. Rogal is a Chicago-based freelance writer with years of experience as an investigative reporter and editor, most notably at The Chicago Reporter, where he concentrated on housing issues. He also has written extensively on alternative energy and the payments card industry for national trade publications.
