JUNE 17, 2014

Steve Bolze, GE Power & Water president and CEO

GREENVILLE, S.C. -- General Electric (NYSE: GE) has broken ground on a new Power & Water advanced manufacturing facility in Greenville. GE plans to invest $400 million during the next 10 years to expand the company's advanced manufacturing capabilities and create more than 80 jobs.

The GE Power & Water Greenville Advanced Manufacturing Works facility will be operational in 2015. This will be GE Power & Water's first advanced manufacturing facility.

The 125,000-square-foot facility will serve as an incubator for innovative advanced manufacturing process development and rapid prototyping for the Power & Water businesses, including wind turbines, heavy-duty gas engines, distributed power gas engines, nuclear power services and water processing.

"Greenville serves as the ideal location for the Power & Water advanced manufacturing site. Here we will be able to deliver even more innovative breakthrough products and services, work better with each other and our customers, and bring best-in-class technologies to market quicker," says Steve Bolze, GE Power & Water president and CEO.

Bolze, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, Sen. Lindsey Graham, Sen. Tim Scott and Greenville County Council Chairman Bob Taylor attended a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Tuesday, June 10 at the current GE Greenville Manufacturing site where the new facility will be co-located.

GE began its Greenville operations more than 40 years ago with a 340,000-square-foot site. The site has since grown into more than 1.5 million square feet of factory and offices, manufacturing products for customers worldwide.

GE has more than 3,000 employees in Greenville and in the last five years has invested more than $500 million to bolster critical manufacturing activities housed in the Greenville County Power & Water campus.

The stock price of General Electric closed at $26.82 per share on Monday, June 16, up from $23.77 per share from this time last year.

-- Danielle Everson 

DURHAM, N.C. -- Cushman & Wakefield | Thalhimer has arranged the $12.5 million sale of Research Tri-Center North V, a 203,385-square-foot multi-tenant industrial facility situated within Research Triangle Park. The fully leased property is located at 3500 N. Tri-Center Blvd. in Durham. Stoltz Real Estate Partners LLC purchased the property from The Silverman Group. Chris Norvell, Scot Humphrey, Jackson Rives and Bill Simerville of Cushman & Wakefield | Thalhimer's capital markets group represented The Silverman Group in the transaction.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- Embassy Suites Hotels and developer BPR Properties have begun construction on Embassy Suites Charlotte Uptown, a 250-suite hotel at 401 E. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. The hotel, which will feature 7,000 square feet of meeting space and an on-site restaurant, is slated to open in June 2016. The hotel will be the ninth Embassy Suites in North Carolina, and it will feature a 24-hour fitness center, business center and an indoor pool.

CHARLESTON, S.C. -- URS Capital Partners has acquired Pepperhill & Palmetto Apartments, a 266-unit apartment community in Charleston. The property will soon be renamed Ashley Village. The New York-based investor purchased the asset using a mix of debt and private equity. Chris Kinder of CK Realty Partners arranged Fannie Mae financing on behalf of URS. Ashley Village is the second Charleston apartment community that URS has purchased in the past 12 months.

Bob Bach of NGKF

The U.S. labor market has been remarkably consistent in its unremarkable performance, observes Robert Bach, director of research for the Americas with Newmark Grubb Knight Frank, following the June 6 announcement by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) that total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 217,000 in May.

"Growth has been strong enough to chip away at the slack in the supply of labor, but not strong enough to reverse the cautious psychology that persists among households and some businesses," wrote Bach in a June 6 research note titled "Back in the Black."

With the 217,000 net new payroll jobs created in May, the U.S. labor market finally recovered all of the 8.7 million jobs lost to the Great Recession. The national unemployment rate remained unchanged at 6.3 percent, the lowest level since September 2008.

"A welcome milestone, it is also a sobering reminder that the labor force has grown by 1.7 million workers since the recession began with virtually no new jobs created for them to fill, which has kept the unemployment rate above the long-term equilibrium rate of 5.5 percent," said Bach. "These totals do not count millions more who have dropped out of the labor force because they can't find work."

The good news for commercial real estate, according to Bach, is that the leasing markets continue to recover and rents are rising, albeit at a slow pace. Meanwhile, the low interest rates are expected to continue to fuel investment activity.

May marked the fourth consecutive month that employers added more than 200,000 jobs.

The BLS also revised total jobs gains in April from 288,000 to 282,000, 6,000 lower than originally reported. The March total was unchanged at 203,000.

To read the full report, click here.

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