At Juniper Capital, we aim to keep you informed about recent real estate developments and relevant news impacting Seattle and the Pacific Northwest. As Northwest private money lenders, we specialize in commercial real estate loans, land development loans, and more. Contact us today for more information about market trends, a current market valuation of your specific development, or any questions you may have about the real estate loan process.
Technology jobs and the economic prosperity that comes along with them are clustering in fewer US cities, states a new report from The Brookings Institution and the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation that examined at U.S. innovation sector job patterns between 2005 and 2017. It should be no surprise Seattle is one of these prosperous hubs, with opportunity to match.
Five metropolitan areas, Boston, the San Francisco Bay Area, San Jose, Seattle, and San Diego accounted for 90 percent of all US growth in “innovation sector” jobs, which Brookings defines as employment in the top science, technology, engineering, and math industries that include extensive research and development spending. At the same time these five areas grew, 343 metro areas lost a share of these jobs. The big bottom line: Wealth and productivity are becoming even more concentrated in fewer, primarily coastal cities.
Being an innovation city comes with costs, such as increasing traffic, higher wage demands and housing shortages. From our standpoint, however, the latter is a definite real estate development opportunity just waiting to be realized. If you’ve followed our blog for any period of time, you know that multi-family housing and office campus developments are very active in the Puget Sound region and driven by this continuing prosperity. In fact, 2019 was one of the most active years on record for Washington State multi-family sales volume, exceeding $3.5 billion (per Real Capital Analytics). This, combined with 5.2 million square feet of office space under construction in the region—4.2 million of it already preleased, the data supports a strong outlook going into 2020.
Thank you to our friends Tim McKay, Dan Chhan, and Sam Wayne at Colliers International for alerting us to this recently published study. If you’d like to understand how these exciting findings translate to real estate investment opportunities, Juniper is here to help. Let us help you realize your investments and development goals with strategic, focused funding. Our goal at Juniper is to help you achieve quality real estate investments–including commercials real estate throughout the Pacific Northwest. If you would like more information on this topic, call us today.
