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Hampton Roads April 2021 – Key Take-Aways

  • Chris Ambrosio with Vandeventer Black and Co-Champion of the Hampton Roads Mastermind  Group kicked off the roundtable reporting that, surprisingly, they are seeing a lot of retail activity, including restaurant leases.  For VB’s office re-occupancy, they are starting to talk about having people back in during the next one to 3 months, in likely some kind of staggered arrangement.
  • London & Norfolk’s Mike Moore reports that they have been working with clients in multiple states and across multiple property types and sizes including a $25M office building, small single tenant retail and a large multi-state self-storage operator.  There is also modeling software being used for the new standards for flood insurance (which will impact premiums) that will go into effect in October 2021.
  • John Berotti and Dan Shelton of Whiting Turner indicate the market is continuing to get stronger having landed about $400M of projects in the last two months.  The industrial market remains white hot, however, with Amazon having done a massive pre-buy of construction materials, there is massive strain on pricing and delivery times.  They are also working on a number of health care and medical space restructuring.
  • Colliers’ Don Crigger reports healthy activity in the office sector with a number of new sublease listings – but also with prospects to backfill.  He suggests that the activity is somewhat covid related, in that plans were likely already in place to unload space, but the pandemic simply accelerated timing.  Chesapeake has been the hardest hit submarket due to the higher concentrations of back office functions housed in that area.
  • Victoria Pickett, also with Colliers, reports a slowdown in the multi-family market, with the first quarter of 2021 being the slowest since the pandemic started.  The most activity is in the private client sector group ($5M or less), with almost no activity with the institutional owners.   Also, of note, there are lots of off market deals happening – lots of match-making underway.  Biggest concern for both sides are rent collections – they are holding up, but he fear is the other shoe dropping.  The team has also been keeping busy putting a number of Broker Opinions of Value.
  • First time attendee Ben Anderson with Colliers represented the industrial team and reports the activity remains incredibly strong, but the challenge being available land and vacant space – with vacancy less than 2%.   3PL activity, Amazon related distributors and last mile distribution companies are dominating the market.

 

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