Free Republic

The tallest building in Fort Worth has a commanding position in the city’s skyline, but the 1M SF building only commanded a price of about $12 per square foot at a foreclosure auction. The price per square foot amounted to less than 10% of the previous sale price for Burnett Plaza, which at 40 stories towers over the other buildings in Fort Worth. The winning bidder was one of Burnett Plaza’s lenders: Pinnacle Bank Texas bought back the building at this month’s auction with a bid of $12.3M, according to a report in the Dallas Business Journal. The previous owner,...

The burning question arose over the past two years what these largely empty older office towers in San Francisco are worth. The market had frozen over. There were no transactions because no one knew what anything was worth as San Francisco’s office market has morphed in just a few years from being one of the hottest office markets in the US with a vacancy rate of 7% in 2019 and some of the highest rents in the US, to being put on ice by working-from-home. About 33% of all office space is now on the market for lease – worse...

Dozens of storeys of the more than 656-foot China Telecom (0728.HK) building “burned with great intensity,” sending thick smoke into the sky, state broadcaster CCTV said. The fire has been put out, but casualty numbers are not known yet, it reported.

Workers at a Maryland office space are lucky to be alive after narrowly escaping a powerful gas explosion that authorities said 'totaled' the building. The incident started just before 7am on Sunday when someone pulled the fire alarm at the Lakewood Office Building and shopping center in Columbia Maryland, a town located about 19 miles southwest of Baltimore, authorities said. Howard County Fire and Rescue emergency crews responded to the scene where fire fighters found gas hissing out of a crater in the parking lot. They made sure the shopping center was completely evacuated just before the office exploded around...

Government scientists who want to find out how fast and far a chemical attack could move through a city will release colorless, harmless gases in subways, an office building and some of Manhattan's most crowded streets to see which way the wind blows them. Ultimately scientists hope they can produce a computerized model of air flow patterns that could help authorities decide where to evacuate people and in which direction after a bioterrorist attack. ``You can use those models to say, `What if something happened here?''' said James Allwine, an engineer with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash....

Houston developer Hines is teaming up with Ross Perot Jr.'s Hillwood development firm to build two office towers at Uptown's Victory project.