News
Hot or Not?
July 10, 2012
| Nope, not talking about Seattle's weather (though we bet most of the country wishes it lived here right now). Readers helped us out with today's list of a few things that are popular—and a few things that aren't. |
| HOT: Apartments |
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| ConAm regional portfolio manager Lauree Crabtree, snapped recently at the Glendale Country Club with MacMillan Associates Consulting principal Bob MacMillan, is a busy woman. ConAm's Pacific Northwest office is repsonsible for managing 26 assets with about 3,500 units, and there's more on the way. ConAm also projects going in West Seattle and Lake City. "Right now it's getting huge," Lauree tells us. |
| HOT: Biking to Work |
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| Except with clothes on, unlike the Fremont Solstice paraders above. "We get more questions on 'How big is your bike storage?' than 'How much parking do you have?'" Urbis Partners principal Cleita Harvey told a roomful of execs at a recent CREW luncheon. Cleita adds that tenants looking to lease are less interested in private offices and more interested in things like mothers' rooms. They also want to know where the market is and how far the bar is, though not necessarily in that order. |
| HOT: Electric Car Charging Stations |
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| The future of transportation—where else but South Lake Union? On a tour of the neighborhood recently, we met ECOtality's Rich Feldman, who showed off the area's first electric vehicle charging station, right outside the SLU Discovery Center. The charger looks like a cross between a gas pump and a computer plug. It's so clean you could lick it, Rich notes, though he declined to actually do so. The point is, he could have. |
| NOT: Condos |
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| At Bisnow's Future of Downtown Bellevue event last month, our all-star panel of developers was asked if there was any appetite for condos. "Only from Canadian developers," scoffed one panelist, referencing Vancouver developer Nat Bosa's plans to build a 41-story condo tower in the Denny Triangle. But Wright Runstad & Co president Greg Johnson disagreed: "I think we'll see condos back on the landscape in a timeframe that will surprise a lot of people." |
| NOT: Ballard |
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| Seattle's robust maritime submarket is as trendy as ever, but "overbuilt," according to one developer we spoke with recently. Said developer then asked that we not print his name for fear that someone with a project in Ballard would call him irate about the comment. |
| SMOKIN' HOT: Weed Dispensaries |
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| Yes, you read that right. "It's a hot, hot thing right now," Chad Anderson, founder of the Chad Anderson Group, tells us. "Our property managers get a ton of calls about that." (What's a ton? Three to four per week, Chad says.) The other thing people seem to want to open is yoga studios. Building is also hot right now, Chad says—from his balcony at the top of Queen Anne, he counted 17 cranes over different parts of the city. |
