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August 20, 1999

Real Estate Buzz

By MARC STILES
Journal Real Estate editor

The more you look at the rumored Amazon.com deal for space at Opus Center @ Union Station, the more it makes sense. The latest piece of the puzzle is the Mountains to Sound Greenway, a multi-faceted project whose aim is to protect the green spaces along the 100-mile Interstate 90 corridor between Thorpe in Kittitas County to Alki Point.

Opus Center @ Union Station is just down the hill from the Internet retailer's new headquarters in the former PacMed tower on Beacon Hill. That should but does not compute into a pathway on which Mr. Bezos and his employees at Amazon could walk or bicycle between the two centers. The reason this is not so lies at the foot of Beacon Hill. It's called the intersection of Interstates 5 and 90. That along with the jumble of associated chaos present one heck of a barrier between PacMed and Opus Center @ Union Station.

In a few years what is now an impediment will be that hand bike and pedestrian trail, which is one of many components of the Mountains to Sound Greenway. Currently, PacMed is the end of the line for the greenway. But the greenway trust plans to piggy-back onto the planned extension of state Route 519 by connecting to it a landscaped bike and pedestrian path. In short, the project will streamline the connection from the western terminus of I-90 to near Union Station and the rest of South Downtown.

This, says Greenway President Jim Ellis, will be the "means of making it through the spaghetti" to the waterfront.

The first phase of the 519 work will include the pathway; it is scheduled to be finished in 2002. Watch for Mr. Bezos on a bike sometime after that.

Stephen Rothrock, the executive director of the Colliers International Corporate Services group, reports strong interest in Matsushita Semiconductor Corporation of America's electronic chip manufacturing plant in Puyallup.

The sale of the 710,654-square-foot campus on 92 acres will be one of the Northwest's biggest deals of the year. The goal is to have it under contract by the end of the year, and Rothrock said the current market makes that doable.

"This week we've had two clients through the building," said Rothrock. "The interest is international due to the fact that it's a one-of-a-kind facility and it's operational."

Matsushita closed the campus last September because of soft demand for computer chips. But it's spending "north of $300,000 a month" to keep the place operational, Rothrock said. That's cheaper than shutting it down, which would contaiminate the cleanroom, a vital component of chip making.

Now the demand for electronic chips is expanding. Micron and Intel's stock prices are heading back up, and the so-called foundry manufacturers are coming into the market. Foundry manufacturers produce semi-conductor chips for a number of buyers, unlike Matsushita, which cranked them out for only its Panasonic products.

"That's the window we're trying to take advantage of," Rothrock said. He added that marketing efforts have taken members of his team to Singapore for an international semi-conductor conference. Next month they'll attend a similar confab in New York.

Regus Business Centres, the British company that has been rumored to be leasing space in the under-construction Three Bellevue Center tower, has agreed to take space in the region's tallest building. Regus is the world's largest provider of short-term office space and will be offering its services in 46,250 square feet of space in Equity Office Properties' Columbia Seafirst Center. Rothrock worked with Colliers colleagues Michael Dash and Jim Footh on the deal.

Does this mean the Regus deal is off in Bellevue? No one would say. But we hear from various sources that it's still a go.

No official deal have been announced at Three Bellevue or any of the other big Bellevue projects. This doesn't mean there's no activity. Far from it.

"Activity has been pretty fierce," says veteran broker John Black of the Broderick Group. "I've never seen so many tenants out in the marketplace."

But it's summer, folks are out of town and getting deals done takes longer than normal. "Things are leasing up quite quickly," said Black, who added that he expects some announcements in the next 60 to 90 days.

Contrary to rumors, Martin Smith Development Corp.'s deal to develop with the Diamond family the parking lot that abuts Occidental Park has not been shelved. The chatter was that the Diamonds wanted more for the parcel than the Smiths were willing to pay.

Greg Smith, a Smith principal, said the half block on the east side of the park and north of South Main Street, could be an office, residential or mixed-use project. The outcome remains to be seen but one thing is certain, Smith says, and that is the deal has not gone away.

They've opened the new King Street Center, and word has reached us that King County's new office building has some mighty powerful ID card readers. So potent are the electronic devices that employees don't have to remove their cards from their wallets to gain access to their new digs. They just have to walk up and wave their fannies by the readers and, boom, they're in.

The result, says our our source, is that a lot of guys "are doing this hula-hoop sort of moon thing" when they arrive at work in the morning.



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