Natomas Area Commercial Real Estate Photolog

[phantom power]

This is sort of a photo-essay. Photos are thru the link.

Natomas is a suburb of north of Sacramento. It was the last major part of the city's area to be developed, and in the last five years thousands of houses have been built on what were once rice fields. The area is also home to Sacramento International Airport, and Arco Arena, where the Sacramento Kings play.

In addition to the residential and accompanying retail development, the area has been home to a large contingent of light industrial facilities, business/medical centers, and distribution warehouses. The number of these facilities has exploded in recent years, and now millions of square feet of space are available.

The following photolog is a very small sampling of what is happening in Natomas. There are still quite a few CRE projects under construction or planned in the area, and it looks like the glut will last quite a while. (The only beneficiaries of the glut appear to be the street racers. Every single empty street and vacant parking lot had circles burned in.)

http://sacrealstats.blogspot.com/2008/02/natomas-area-commercial-real-estate.html

[lapfog_1]

1. That's a lot of tilt-up see throughs.

A phenomenon in CA.

So named because of the a) building technique (prefab walls moved to construction site and "tilted up" into place. and b) no interior walls, just open floor space, which allows the passerby to "see thru" the entire building. No interior walls because no tenet has EVER occupied the building, hence no cubes or anything.

Drive down I880 or 237 in the Bay Area and you can see a lot of these office buildings. And yet, when you are a struggling young startup, you still can't do a deal for space there at affordable rates, mostly because the building need at least one large tenet so that they can pay for heating/cooling/cleaning etc.

Some of these types of buildings have been vacant for 6 or 7 years now.

And then there are the buildings that were built in the mid '90s, only to have their primary tenets leave for bigger buildings, leaving the old building unoccupied and unable to be rented. Plenty of those as well.

[Warpy]

2. I'm starting to see that in parts of this town

especially the new suburbs and exurbs, here in central NM. I see strip malls that were put up next to big indoor malls and all are losing tenants at a very quick pace. The areas are new and attractive and eerily like this photo essay. Too much of the local housing was sold to out of state speculators to support the retail infrastructure that was built to service it.

The land was just ranchland before developers moved in, desert scrub that had difficulty supporting many head of cattle and no farming, so its conversion into real estate was not a huge loss to anybody but the coyotes, rattlesnakes and prairie dogs.

[NMDemDist2]

3. I opened the first Arco Arena and worked one season in the 2nd

but I heard they moved everything over to Yolo County??