Colliers International

Specialty: Investment sales; office, retail and industrial leasing; apartment and hotel transactions; consulting; property management; corporate services; valuation and market research
CEO: Doug Frye
Year founded: 1898; 1979 in Seattle

Aigner

The amount of investment capital looking to land on real estate in the Puget Sound region is as much as veteran broker Rob Aigner has seen in “a long, long time.”

The appetite for land is particularly voracious, and not just among developers. “I’m amazed by how far afield both tenants and developers are willing to look,” he said. Aigner, executive managing director of Colliers’ Northwest region, doesn’t expect the trend to slow in 2005, even if interest rates continue climbing.

“Everything I’ve been reading and listening to ... is the rise in interest rates will be marginal,” said Aigner. He anticipates the Federal Reserve will increase rates four times in 2005 for a total of 1 percent.

Colliers Puget Sound was in on a couple major transactions in 2004, including the $28.25 million sale of Fife Business Park and the $26.5 million sale of Tacoma Place.

Aigner said he thinks the Seattle office market will pick up in 2005. While the downtown Bellevue market has notched a positive absorption rate of about 500,000 square feet so far in 2004, Seattle’s rate has been a negative 58,000 square feet. Aigner predicted Seattle will cross into positive territory in 2005.

“Seattle is just a couple of tenants from being, I think, a very healthy marketplace,” he said, adding it all relates to job growth. “We’ll have job growth. I think it’s going to be in the range of 1 to 2 percent.” He cautioned not to bank on the kind of growth the region experienced in the late 1990s. “I just don’t know if we’ll ever see those numbers again in our lifetime.”