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November 11, 1999

Real Estate Buzz

The speculation begins now that a "sold" sign has been slapped on the boxy old Seattle waterfront building that once housed Ivar's Captain's Table Restaurant. There's one problem: the well-situated property at 333 Elliott Ave. W., hasn't been officially sold just yet.

There are two competing offers and a representative of the trust that owns the land is trying to structure the best deal for his clients. It's a complicated situation, made even more complex by the fact that the site was contaminated four score and five years ago when a wood-treating facility operated on the site.

Such details cloud the heart of the matter, which is who's buying the land and what they plan to do with it. Among brokers, the belief is that whoever secures it will construct a mid-rise office building. This makes sense because it would fill in the blank between the string of such office buildings to the south and the new three-building complex, the 401 Elliott West project, that Seattle developer Koehler McFadyen & Co., has under construction to the north.

Alas, plans for the property remain unknown because it's unclear who will buy it. There are three logical guesses and they are three developers already active in the neighborhood: Koehler McFadyen, the Sabey Corp., and Martin Selig. The feeling among the real estate community is that it's Selig.

Steve Koehler said he's not the one, and a spokesperson for Sabey gave no indication that Sabey is going after the land either. Selig didn't return phone calls.

One commercial real estate expert, Kip Spencer of Officespace.com, thinks the Selig rumor is on target. "It's not a bad play because he knows the Queen Anne neighborhood," Spencer said.

Al Lowe is trustee for the sellers, which include two local tribes as well as the federal government. (The parties got the land in a swap with Pacific Sound Resources - also known as the Wyckoffs. The PSR shareholders gave up the property in exchange for being released from any financial liability for the cost of cleaning up some other contaminated sites. We told you this part was complicated, didn't we?)

Lowe would not disclose the competing buyers' identities but said he thinks the deal will close in 60 to 90 days. As for the contamination, Lowe added there is some but that it poses no public health threat.

In Bothell, the Trammell Crow Co.'s new North Creek Highlands building that has long been vacant is about to have a tenant, according to talk among brokers. It's not clear who the occupant will be, however.

There was chatter that the tenant for the 64,220 square-foot high-tech flex building is Foster Wheeler, an international engineering company that has an office in Bellevue. Don't believe it.

"The rumor you had is false," said John Black, a Broderick Group broker whose client is Foster Wheeler. "We're out looking around for space. We did consider that building and we eliminated that. We're just in the search process trying to find either a new home or stay where they're at so it's kind of a premature requirement right now."

This isn't the end of the story. Another company, represented by Black's colleague, Paul Jerue, has begun to negotiate for the space. Jerue couldn't talk specifics or name names because there's nothing to talk about yet. A spokesperson for Trammell Crow added nothing has been signed.

The Sabey Corp., is leaving its waterfront digs in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer Building in the neighborhood where it has had its headquarters for about 10 years.

Sabey, which developed the P-I building and owns it, is moving in March to its newest project: Intergate.West in Tukwila, according to the company's "Two Minute Update" that came out Tuesday. 2Way Communications has signed a lease for part of the soon-to-be-former Sabey HQ space and 3,950 square feet remain. Intergate.West is one portion of the 1 million square foot Intergate tech campus, which Sabey officials say will give their growing company the elbow room it needs.

The update added that only two floors, or 33,000 square feet, remain available at the three-building, 244,000-square-foot Inter-gate.West. The newest tenants are Pac-West Telecomm, a telco switching company that has taken 16,851 square feet, and Zama Networks, an Internet startup that is leasing 35,075 square feet.

For the times, they are a changin': The electronic revolution that is transforming the real estate business, on both the residential and commercial sides. More and more information is being shared, and that prompts Glenn E. Crellin, director of the Washington Center for Real Estate Research at WSU, to ask if this will devalue the role of the real estate broker.

"Obviously that question cannot be answered with certainty, but a likely response is that the nature of the broker's role will change and the threshold level of production to be successful in the business will increase," Crellin writes in an essay entitled "e-Realty."

He adds the business will stabilize with a more technically skilled, professional work force working with buyers and sellers who are better informed. Since the typical real estate licensee in Washington is in his or her late 40s or early 50s, "it is likely there will be some shakeout as less technologically savvy licensees give way to those, mostly younger, professionals who are comfortable with and actually embrace the new way of doing business."

Talk about lousy timing... Representatives of the Port Ludlow Golf Course Community sent out a press release this week that states "the real estate craze is hitting the Olympic Peninsula in a big way."

The release touted the fact that home buyers snapped up 13 residences in Port Ludlow in August. That's twice the number that typically go for that time of year. Sales have been brisk since, the release added.

The clinker comes later in the release after it talks about multiple offers being made on houses in Kingston. The high-tech industry is fueling the bonanza, but the real lure may be the state's new foot ferries, according to the release that was dated Monday.

On Tuesday, state Department of Transportation officials announced that the one area likely to be hardest hit by good ol' Initiative 695 is the state ferry system. The recently approved tax-slashing initiative slices the DOT's biannual budget by one-third and a possible response by the state is to cut all passenger-only ferry runs, DOT officials said.

So much for moving to Kingston.



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