Bentall

Specialty: Property development; real estate investment management, services and merchant banking

Management: Gary Carpenter, executive vice president, Seattle Operations

Founded: 1997

Current projects: Summit Office Center, completion of second tower and development of third; preliminary work on redeveloping one of six Newport Corporate Center buildings in Factoria

Rendering by Andrew West The final phase of Bentall’s Summit development in downtown Bellevue includes the building in the foreground, which is in for permits. The other two buildings are finished.

In August, Bentall completed the second tower at the Summit Office Center in Bellevue and delivered it 100 percent occupied. It’s now obtaining permits for the third and final phase of the Summit, a 15-story tower that will bring the firm’s downtown Bellevue holdings to nearly 900,000 square feet when completed in 2008.

Executive Vice President Gary Carpenter says the Summit played a big role in making 2005 a record year for Bentall’s Seattle office.

The Canadian firm has operations throughout North America and owns more than 3 million square feet of office space in the Northwest.

Overinvested

“We’re overinvested in Seattle, with close to a billion dollars in (the area),” says Carpenter. “We’d really like to push ourselves into other markets.”

Last year, Southern California looked to be a major growth opportunity, with Bentall’s main client, a Canadian public pension plan called Caisse de Dépôt et Placement du Québec, looking to invest in Orange County. But California prices have been too high to warrant acquisitions there.

Bentall is invested on a small scale in an affordable housing group in California that purchases properties subsidized by the federal government with tax credits and rent subsidies.

“They can be quite profitable for the developer, but they’re locked in for 55 years of ownership,” Carpenter says. “You can’t just go casually in and out of these things.”

Vice President Lisa Rowe says that even as Bentall looks to diversify beyond our region, it will continue to have a major presence here. “Bentall’s been in this market for quite some time,” she says, “we expect we will always be in it.”