Bentall Capital

Specialty: Property development; real estate investment management, services and merchant banking
Management: Gary Carpenter, executive vice president, Seattle Operations
Year founded: 1997
Largest recent project: Summit development, Bellevue

Carpenter

Gary Carpenter of Bentall Capital’s Seattle office says the firm is exceeding its clients’ expectations despite a difficult investment climate.

“If you’re a buyer, it is really hard to generate investment yields because price points are so darn high in all forms of real estate,” Carpenter says.

Carpenter attributes his office’s success to its ability to keep its properties occupied — at about 94 percent.

Bentall manages about 3 million square feet of office space in the Northwest and smaller areas of residential, industrial and retail space.

Parent firm Bentall Capital has 1,400 employees in Canada and the United States, 90 of whom work in the Seattle office.

Carpenter says the local office’s prospects for growth are mostly in Southern California. Bentall sold off all its California properties but is now trying to reinvest, primarily in Orange County.

“The one client we do most of our work for feels they have enough property in Seattle,” he says. Caisse Depot, a Montreal-headquartered public and pension plan, wants to diversify its Bentall-managed holdings in the United States.

Bentall also has land it’s working to develop in the Northwest.

The firm is under way on its second tower at the Summit in downtown Bellevue. Bentall developed the building now occupied by Puget Sound Energy at the corner of Northeast Fourth Street and 108th Avenue Northeast. But, following the dot-com implosion, it put plans for the second tower on hold until PSE recently decided to expand to 235,000 square feet in the second tower. That project is under construction.

Bentall is seeking the permits necessary to complete its originally envisaged three-building Summit complex and hopes to put a 15-story, 250,000-square-foot tower on the site.