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Edelweiss for Eglo
Doug Smith and Greg Herren of Seefried Properties.
Ferdinand Seefried's Austrian and European connections benefited Atlanta once again as Seefried Properties worked with Pill, Austria-based Eglo to bring the international lighting firm's Americas HQ to Royal 85 in the I-85 South submarket.
Seefried Properties' Doug Smith and Greg Herren worked with Eglo on the HQ relo with Ferdinand, who is Austrian honorary counsel general for Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee. What started out as a build-to-suit project turned into acquisition of an existing property due to Eglo's timing and immediate need for an Atlanta location, Herren said. Jones Lang LaSalle's Steve Grable, Chris Tomasulo and Scott Polinski, as well as Dwayne Wood of RDW Cos., represented previous owner Founders Properties in the building's sale.
Eglo is relocating its North and South American headquarters from Miami and will occupy approximately half of the 116,000-square-foot building at 3640 Royal South Parkway. Smith and Herren will market the remainder of the building.
Atlanta's status as a logistics hub and Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport's connectivity to most anywhere in North and South America sealed the deal, and the opportunity to acquire a relatively new distribution center at a good, though undisclosed, cost helped, too, Herren said.
"You can buy a building right now cheaper than you can develop it," he said. 
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ULI Emerging Trends
 From left to right: Christopher Dietrick of PricewaterhouseCoopers, Jeff Dufresne of ULI and Tamia Sammons of ULI.
Though it's called Emerging Trends, some things stay the same.
The Urban Land Institute has produced its Emerging Trends publication for 32 years, and this year ULI and PricewaterhouseCoopers interviewed 875 people across a spectrum of commercial and residential real estate categories to gauge industry sentiment. Wednesday, ULI unveiled its findings at a symposium at American Cancer Society Center Downtown.
What stays the same: investors and developers in general like core, gateway markets with significant barriers to entry, areas like D.C., the San Francisco Bay area, Seattle and New York. Also, Atlanta makes them nervous, drawing a red flag for any prospective new development, though respondents did note our great colleges and universities, the airport, quality infill development and relatively low-cost business environment and right-to-work status. It's up to us to alter those negative perceptions, said ULI Senior Fellow Stephen Blank.
"Things are better than they seem to people from the outside," Blank said.
That might be tough, though, given Atlanta's boom and bust nature, as Leo Wells pointed out. The founder of Wells Real Estate Funds has seen the same troughs and peaks over and over and is less interested in when a recovery happens than how you make money off the upturn, which, for Leo is with a lot of cash and a little debt. Developers and lenders tend to repeat the same mistakes and go over the cliff together, which (usually) leaves opportunities to pick up distressed assets.
"You're not killing the developer," Wells explained, in his own Leo-way. "They committed suicide, and you're taking advantage of their dead body."
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Learning from the Masters
Fidelity National Title Group Vice President Christy Hockmeyer introduces her team to Morris Manning & Martin's Lunch & Learn attendees.
Even attorneys can be taught a new trick or two. Who knew? Fidelity National Title Group hosted a lunch & learn session at Morris, Manning & Martin's office Wednesday afternoon. Armed with a nutritious lunch and their brand new survey group, the 1031 exchange group led by Leon Adams Jr., Fidelity National shared with MMM's powerhouse real estate team all the ways they can ease distressed transactions. We're pretty sure everyone stayed awake.
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Fowl Weekend on the High Plains
From left to right: Paul Roeser of Jones Lang LaSalle, Bob Robers of Jones Lang LaSalle and Ray Stache of Cushman & Wakefield. It was a bad weekend to be a pheasant as industrial superbrokers Paul Roeser and Bob Robers of Jones Lang LaSalle and Ray Stache of Cushman & Wakefield converged on Oak Tree Lodge in Watertown , S.D. , for a hunting trip with friends from Evans General Contracting.
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Get on the Bus with YCR
A look at White Provision in Midtown. To say West Midtown and the Howell Mill/Marietta Street corridor have changed over the past 10 or 15 years is a bit of an understatement, so the Atlanta Commercial Board of REALTORS' YCR will take a look at the area Wednesday, Nov. 3, with the "West Midtown, Then and Now" bus tour. The event starts with an 11:30 a.m. lunch and a roundtable discussion at White Provision, 1100 Howell Mill Road, and continues with a bus tour of the district. The afternoon wraps with happy hour at Ormsby's from 4:30 'til 7 p.m. Full-day participants earn three hours of continuing education credit.
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