Gary Carpenter thinks times are still good for building more Puget Sound-area offices and luxury apartments.

“I remain bullish,” said the chief operating officer of Bentall Corp.’s American operations, based in Bellevue. “I don’t want to overemphasize bullish, but I’m optimistic about the future of real estate in this region.”

So far, office space vacated by shrinking dot-coms — generally regarded as the biggest threat to slow the market — has promptly gone to other tenants, Carpenter said. He thinks that will continue until dot-coms stabilize.

“If the (dot-com sublease) trend continues, we many not have a market as hot as it was nine months ago, but it will still be a full market by general standards,” Carpenter said.

Vancouver, B.C.-based Bentall’s office developments reflect that guarded bullishness.

The firm owned a prime site in downtown Bellevue when the office market heated up in 1997. A spate of developers launched plans to build more downtown Bellevue office towers than it appeared the market could handle. Bentall sat that race out.

Then in 1999, the market caught a second, even hotter wave of demand. Bentall, it turned out, had conducted enough early planning for its Summit site and jumped to the front of a fresh pack of proposals. The Summit went into construction last November without a signed tenant.

The Summit’s design also conveys controlled optimism. The project is ambitious, for it could become downtown Bellevue’s largest office complex at nearly 800,000 square feet. But Bentall broke it into three buildings of either 12 or 13 stories each, and will build them in phases. Bentall could stop at 521,000 square feet instead of go for all 800,000 if the market weakens.

“Two buildings is pretty comfortable for us,” Carpenter said. “The third is if the market allows. We’re in permitting getting (the third one) teed up.”

Bentall has one building left to construct in its 625,000-square-foot Millennium Corporate Park office complex in Redmond. The structure is permitted, but Bentall will wait to start the expensive construction process until it signs a tenant, Carpenter said.

Bentall’s luxury apartment and condo division, Continental-Bentall, has positioned itself in the past couple of years as downtown Seattle’s most aggressive luxury high-rise developer, launching three proposals with almost 900 expensive apartments.

Bentall’s 31-story, 366-apartment tower called the Metropolitan at Seventh and Westlake avenues is well into construction. Continental-Bentall is shooting to start construction of the 33-story, 251-apartment Century Tower at Ninth and Virginia in April.

Continental-Bentall had planned another, similar structure next to Century Tower, but Bentall recently listened to its bullish side and inserted a 600,000-square-foot office building into the proposal for the block. The office tower would have 150 condos atop it and another 200-condo tower next to it. Bentall is early in the lengthy permitting process for the offices and condos.

Continental-Bentall has 160 condominiums under construction in Ballard, too.

Bentall’s majority stockholder recently initiated a move to take the company private.

Bentall placed Millennium Corporate Park and the 200,000-square-foot Sammamish Park Place office complex in Issaquah up for sale along with three Southern California office projects that Bentall values collectively at $560 million.

At the same time, Bentall is looking for sites to buy in Seattle and on the Eastside. —