COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE NEWS

• Blackstone Group, the private equity firm that bought Equity Office Properties earlier this month in the biggest leveraged buyout ever, agreed to sell 17 of Equity’s former buildings in the San Diego area to closely held Irvine Co. for an undisclosed sum. The buildings sold to Irvine have 2.1 million square feet of suburban office space. The highest sales in suburban San Diego have averaged $428 a square foot, according to Real Capital Analytics. That would value the sale at about $900 million. Blackstone has also sold 61 buildings in New York City, Washington, Seattle and Portland, Oregon, since taking over EOP, leaving it with about 400 buildings.

• Office rents rose an average 12 percent worldwide last year, driven by global economic expansion, with Mumbai, India, increasing enough to make it the world’s fifth most expensive city, a Cushman & Wakefield study found. While rents in New York’s Midtown Manhattan market rose 28 percent to $81.93 a square foot, its position worldwide dropped to No. 7 from No. 5, pushed down by Mumbai and Dublin, Ireland. Africa and the Middle East had the biggest increases, with rents rising 32 percent in the region.

• Singapore’s biggest developer, CapitaLand, plans to buy sites and redevelop properties to create office buildings to meet the increasing shortage of space in the city-state, where office rents rose 30 percent last year, the biggest gain in 11 years. Developers add about 500,000 square feet of office space each year, compared with demand of as much as 3 million square feet, according to CapitaLand Chief Executive Liew Mun Leong. Elsewhere, Indonesian developers are planning as many as 47 projects in Jakarta, Investor Daily Indonesia reported.

Source: Bloomberg News