In the Puget Sound-area the merger will boost Equity s 5.4 million square feet by about 17 percent. Martin Selig says independence has helped him continue building large office projects. Spieker s plan is to use the capital to focus more on the Eastside suburban office market. The REIT already has bought several office trophies, such as Eastgate Office Park and Lincoln Executive Center, and Bellevue City Hall officials say they met recently with Spieker representatives to discuss the company s plans to build an office tower of up to 20 stories in downtown Bellevue, on Northeast Eighth Street between 108th and 110th avenues northeast. The common thread here is that all the players involved in these deals are institutions.
Carpenter speaks from experience.
He and a former partner, Dick Clotfelter, ran a development company, Prescott, that closed after banks shut off the flow of capital to builders when the bottom fell out of the real estate market a decade ago. Now, however, he s with a larger, publicly traded company that can use its own credit and sell its own properties to move in and take advantage of opportunities. Certainly, some of the developers who were around for the last wave of development are still here today. Chairman and Chief Executive Jon Runstad said it s not quite right to say his company now is merely a developer for Equity Office. According to Selig, who has built millions of square feet of commercial space, development today does not necessarily belong only to institutions.