Business at Cushman & Wakefield, one of the largest brokerage firms in the country, has been stellar.

Cushman’s Northwest Senior Managing Director Jim Bowles has been in the business for 23 years and said he has never seen a market as hot as last year’s, both locally and nationally.

“I think it was a good year for everybody in the commercial real estate business,” he said, and 2001 is shaping up to be another solid year.

“I think we’re going from a red hot market to a really good market,” Bowles said. “I don’t think anybody thought the velocity of the (2000) market could stay that way forever. We’re cautiously optimistic as we look into this year.”

Bowles said companies this year are being more cautious with their growth and how they are going to operate. “In many ways that’s probably healthy,” he said.

While vacancy rates have been going up, Bowles said rental rates will remain strong and have stabilized in the $36-$38 per square foot range.

Bowles said the much publicized dot-com companies are a small percentage of the overall market. “There’s a lot of companies out there that are not dot-com companies that are doing just fine.

“I think a lot of the existing companies are going to take a lot of the space from the dot-com companies,” Bowles said. “... by the time the shakeout is over with, I image the retail rates will be about the same as today and vacancies will be higher. Overall, I feel pretty positive about the market.”

With that in mind, Bowles said the local markets will not likely get above the 5 percent vacancy rate.

In addition to its Seattle office, Cushman also operates a Bellevue office. A lot of the highrise space coming on line in Bellevue doesn’t have a great deal of pre-leasing activity. He predicted that those buildings will lease up fairly quickly once they are built and people can see them.

Cushman is gearing up on a national scale to do more institutional apartment sales. Puget Sound area apartment sales, which make up about 10 percent of local revenues, are also expected to become a larger piece of the pie.

Bowles wouldn’t comment on how much the apartment business is expected to grow, but did say, “we’re pretty well positioned to stay in contact with the major institutional players and investors.”

Some of the larger deals Cushman has made in the past year include representing IDX Systems for over 300,000 square feet of the IDX Tower and selling the 1 million square-foot Valley Industrial Park in Kent. The firm currently represents Opus for its Eastpointe Corporate Center in Issaquah and its Northpointe Corporate Campus in Lynnwood. It also is in charge of filling 1.2 million square feet of commercial space in Quadrant’s mixed-use Redmond Ridge project.

Cushman’s local offices are known for their office and industrial leasing, plus institutional investment sales. Nationally, the firm focuses on all aspects of commercial real estate, from appraisals to property and facilities management and structured financing.