Taiwanese cell phone maker HTC, which has been adding employees at a brisk pace since opening an office in Durham earlier this year, will soon be taking more office space in American Tobacco Campus.

The company is expanding by 31,266 square feet in ATC's Crowe and Foweler buildings.

With the expansion, HTC's total square footage will reach 47,000.

Heath Chapman and Don Shupe of CB Richard Ellis' Raleigh office represented HTC in the deal. The two also represented Health IT Services Group, which recently signed a lease for 43,500 square feet of space in ATC.

HTC now employes about 60 people in Durham and has job openings for a dozen more on its website.

The office focuses on long-term research projects.

HTC initially took 15,000 square feet of space in ATC with an option to occupy more as it grew.

The timing of the Duke Energy and Progress Energy merger has been unfortunate for downtown Raleigh property owners looking to sell.

Although the merger may not end up affecting property values downtown all that much, the uncertainty caused by the merger could make a nearby building tougher to sell.

Now consider the plight of 227 Fayetteville Street, the 10-story building that is the former regional headquarters for Wachovia.

On Jan. 31, a 50-year ground lease between Wachovia and the owners of the land will expire.

At that point, ownership of the 100,000-square-foot building and the land will revert back to the families of the original owners, Morton Rosenfeld and Milton Schwarz of New York City.

The building, built in 1964, is now up for sale. The owners are open to either selling or signing another long-term ground lease.
 

CB Richard Ellis Realty Trust, a real estate investment trust sponsored by CBRE investors, has bought three office buildings near Research Triangle Park as part of a joint venture with Duke Realty.

The buildings total 265,073 square feet. They include 3900 North Paramount Parkway (100,987 SQ), 3900 South Paramount Parkway (119,170 SF) and 1400 Perimeter Park Drive (44,916 SF) in Morrisville.

The purchase price wasn't disclosed. The three buildings have a tax value of $34.5 million.

The buildings are part of the master-planned Perimeter Park that was developed by seller Duke Realty.

The buildings are 100 percent leased to two tenants, with 95 percent of the space leased to Pharmaceutical Product Development Inc. through November 2023. The remaining 5 percent of space is leased to LSSi Corporation through September 2012.

Jack Cuneo, CEO and president for CB Richard Ellis Realty Trust, said in a release that Raleigh is an income market for office investments and that the presence of the government sector, major universities and healthcare facilities has helped shield Raleigh from the worst effects of the national recession.

The joint venture between CBRE Realty Trust and Duke was formed in May 2008 and is 80 percent owned by CBRE's REIT.

The venture plans to acquire up to $800 million of newly developed build-to-suit projects over a three-year period.

If you're a collector of colorful real estate descriptions, you might want to check out the recently released CB Richard Ellis report on the commercial real estate investment market in the Triangle in 2009.

After describing the heady days in the middle of the previous decade as a time when "investors shopped for trophy assets with the ease of a trip to the mall," the report goes on to describe the market for buying and selling office buildings in 2009 thusly:

"It's as if a bus drove off a cliff and witnesses are still waiting for the explosion."

And to think people accuse real estate folks of being pollyannish.

This week's $10.5 million sale of the Huntington Athletic Club Apartments in Morrisville wasn't the biggest Triangle apartment deal to close this month.

In another sign that buyers and sellers are finding some common ground,
the 292-unit Lenox @ Patterson Place Apartments in Durham was bought by
The Connor Group, an Ohio real estate company, on Dec. 1 for just over $20 million.

The price was 11 percent less than the seller, Equity Residential, a Chicago-based real estate investment trust, paid for the property in February 2006.