@Properties, the powerhouse broker that rode the housing wave to success over the last five years, is adding a commercial brokerage division.
The reason? Buyers are asking about commercial investments, and @Properties wants to position itself to offer the best of both worlds. The Illinois Real Estate Journal has the story:
[Co-founder Thaddeus Wong] says many of the buyers interested in the properties the company offers are coming in from overseas, especially from Ireland and other parts of Europe.
“As the value of the dollar starts to decline, they’re looking to invest over here,” he says. “There’s still a lot of development here and a lot of people from Ireland looking to invest in that development.”
Huh? A lot of Irish buyers are rushing over here to buy property? I find that a strange tie-in to the Spiral developed by an Irishman. @ is the local broker for the spiral. Something does not add up…
paulj,
The tipoff that the story is whacked in a number of ways comes with the article’s first sentence: “The largest privately owned residential brokerage firm in Chicago, @properties …”
I think Baird & Warner and a number of other firms would be surprised to learn that @properties is larger than they are.
It gets siller, as you note, and the reporter kept swallowing it: ““We thought that since such a huge percentage of our clients are investing in both commercial and residential …”
“As the value of the dollarl starts to decline … ” Uh … hasn’t it been declining for quite a while already?
My favorite mistake (is it going up for rent?) in the story is this: “The firm was also recently named leasing agent for the Chicago Spire.”
All that apart, there is Irish money investing in Chicago – Irish expat Sean Conlon is overseeing a pool of it. And some of it is doubtless going to the top-tier commercial real estate firms, whose ranks have historically been impervious to firms that began on the residential front.
Looks like propaganda. I don’t buy for one minute that there is a large number of clients coming to a residential brokerage that are also looking for commercial property. Instead, this is a last ditch effort to try and diversify after the fact. I don’t believe they ever actually thought the residential boom would end. It may be too litte, too late. Only time will tell.
Yup. Everyone’s fleeing residential RE and flocking to commercial, where its still booming. But for how long? If anything, I’d say the commercial real estate bubble will be popping within a year. How many new office towers does downtown really need during an economic slowdown?
NYT on deal seeking Europeans
Pete,
You might be surprised. Economic slowdowns tend to mean more business for law firms and accounting practices (as they work to bail out their clients), which in turn leads to hiring and expansion of offices.
We’ve seen this in the Loop in the last 5 years…pretty much every single new Class A lease has been for a professional services firm expanding out of old space.