Roundtable QA: COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE.

AuthorBicknell, Lindsay

This month, Utah Business partnered with Holland & Hart to host a roundtable event featuring Utah real estate leaders to disk cuss the Inland Port, air quality, and outlooks for the 2020 L market. Moderated by Lindsay Cleverly, executive director at NAIOP, here are a few highlights from the event.

Q How did Utah's commercial real estate sector fair in 2019? What docs this year look like?

Jeremy Jensen | EVP, Partner | IPG Commercial Real Estate

From an industrial real estate perspective, 2019 was extremely strong with a very low vacancy rate. New construction is tending to adequately meet demand. Rents have been increasing for landlords, and land prices have been rising.

2020 has started out very strong with demand for space, keeping pace with what's being built. Developers are kicking off several projects, but that seems to be meeting market demand adequately.

Peter Corroon | President, Real Estate Division | Sentry Financial

On the retail front, we've seen that the retail sector has been gravitating towards the lifestyle centers. And now with the Coronavirus, it seems like we're going to see that sector hurt again because people will likely avoid retail centers.

Eli Mills | SVP, Institutional Properties | CBRE

From an investment standpoint, Utah is more desired than ever. In 2019, we saw Starwood enter our marketplace. We saw bids from groups such as Blackstone. There are a number of others that are trying to get in and Utah is looked at more and more by institutional investors than ever before.

In 2020, we won't see anything different. Short of the Coronavirus and what's going on economically, when that settles back out, we won't see anything different than what was there before.

Kip Paul | Vice Chairman, Investment Sales I Cushman & Wakefield

I think the question of the moment might be what are we seeing right now due to the events in the world. We see some buyers' enthusiasm for real estate is enhanced given the gyrations in the stock market. And many of those transactions continue to close as scheduled and as planned. On the other end of the spectrum, we've seen some buyers, particularly in the larger-sized projects, that are feeling uncertainty, who view making a very sizable purchase as a risky venture. And so they've kind of hit the pause button on some of those projects.

For the most part, most sellers are saying, "let's just take it slow here." Get our marketing materials ready. Wait for the dust to settle with all the events...

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