The News Tribune Business Team will keep you updated on what's happening in the South Sound and beyond. Check here for news about economic development, aerospace, shopping and much more.
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Contributors
Marce Edwards is the business editor. She has been at The News Tribune for seven years and has written about technology and big businesses in the South Sound including Weyerhaeuser and Russell. Before moving to Tacoma, she worked at The Idaho Statesman in Boise. She is a Northwest native who likes to garden and refuses to use an umbrella. She lives in Tacoma with her husband and two kids.
C.R. Roberts is a Tacoma native. Before joining The News Tribune, he worked as a freelance writer and part-time cowhand on a cattle ranch in Northern Idaho. He writes about small business, personal finance and other business issues.
John Gillie writes about the aerospace and airline industries, commercial development and consumer issues. During his 30-year-tenure at The News Tribune he has covered issues as diverse as the Native American fishing rights disputes, crime and the courts, the wood products industry and energy. He lived in Tacoma with his family for 25 years, but now lives in Kent because his wife heads a five-state non-profit foundation headquartered in Ballard, and it only seemed a sensible compromise to make considering their workplaces are 40 miles apart.
Kelly Kearsley has been a business reporter at The News Tribune since 2005. She covers the Port of Tacoma and international trade. Being born and raised in Spokane she’s used to living in cities with inferiority complexes and, in fact, prefers it. Prior to working at The News Tribune, she spent three years as a reporter for The Bulletin in Bend, Oregon and another year working stints for The Associated Press and Seattle Times. She graduated from Pacific Lutheran University. She lives in Tacoma with her husband and miniature schnauzer.
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CB Richard Ellis has issued its latest quarterly survey of office and industrial space in the Puget Sound Region – and, well, it could be worse.
If the region has not fared “too badly,” it’s thanks to “Microsoft, Amazon and Expedia and the like,” the company said in a release this week.
For office space, the Seattle central business district fared not so well, with 627,766 square feet of negative absorption – which means that much space, previously occupied, was counted as not rented during the period.
Eighty-three percent of the downtown Seattle figure was due to Washington Mutual vacating its spaces.
The Tacoma central business district showed 2.82 million square feet or rentable space in the quarter, with a vacancy rate of 10 percent and total absorption of negative-36,322 square feet.
Suburban Tacoma saw total office space of 1.12 million square feet, with a 5.4 percent vacancy rate. Fife showed 81,217 net square feet with a 35.8 percent vacancy rate, and Puyallup marked 138,962 square feet with 18.5 percent vacant.
The total average asking rental rate for office space in the Puget Sound region was $30.07 per-square-foot, with the Tacoma-Fife area asking $22.86, the lowest but for South King County.
For industrial space, CBRE reported nearly 27.7 million square feet of net rentable area in the Tacoma-Fife area, with 9.3 percent of the space vacant at the end of the quarter. There are 900,000 square feet under construction in the area.
The overall region recorded 240.9 million square feet of industrial space, with a vacancy rate of 6.3 percent and 2.2 million square feet under construction.
The direct asking rate for industrial space in the Tacoma area was 34 cents per-square-foot, with the larger market averaging 52 cents.
Yes, poet T.S. Eliot called April cruel. But where was Tom when the stock market started to recover?
Tacoma-based Russell Investments has issued April results for the small-cap Russell 2000 Index – which recorded an increase of 15.5 percent. This is the second-greatest monthly gain in 30 years of available data.
Only February of 2000 offered a larger return, at 16.5 percent. Even with this recent surge, the index continued to reflect a negative year-to-date return, down 1.8 percent, through April.
“The small-cap segment wasn’t alone in April as every segment of the U.S. equity market measured by Russell Indexes added value for the month, ranging from 6.8 percent for the Russell Top 50 Index to 16.7 percent for the Russell Midcap Value Index,” the company said in a release today.
Expedia, the on-line travel booking service based in Bellevue, reports it's losing about $3 million a month on its no-fee airline ticket booking promotion.
The Internet travel agency debuted the free service seven weeks ago. It formerly changed a small fee to book airline tickets on its Web site.
The no-fee promotion ends June 1. Expedia hasn't yet decided whether to extend the deal.
The travel service is attempting to attract the thousands of travelers who compare airline fares on its site, but then book them on airline sites because those sites charge no extra fees.
Expedia hoped to entice those travelers to buy extra travel services such as rental cars and tours on which Expedia makes a healthy commission on those products.
Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said this week he would consider competitors' countermoves before reinstating the fees.
When The News Tribune recently moved to an abridged stock table, we unintentionally omitted from our listing several stocks that a Tacoma Community College class was following.
In the interests of continuity and education, here are those closing prices for Friday:
ConocoPhillips $42.50, up $1.50 or 3.66%
OfficeMax Inc. $7.35, down $0.10 or 1.34%
TriQuint Semiconductor Inc. $3.83, unchanged.
MassMutual Corporate Investor $20.70, up $.060 or 2.99%
Are you intrigued by the towering container cranes, the massive grain silos and the web of rail lines at the Port of Tacoma?
Here's a way to satisfy that curiosity and learn more about Tacoma's working waterfront:
Take the guided bus tour the Port of Tacoma is offering on Monday, May 11. The price is right -- free.
The tour begins at 1:30 p.m. and lasts until 3 p.m.
You'll need reservations. Call 253-383-9463 or e-mail the port at bustours@portoftacoma.com to secure your seat. Children over six are welcome. A photo identification is required for participants over 17.
The tours begin at the Fabulich Center, 3600 Port of Tacoma Road.
Mexico's loss is becoming Seattle's gain as cruise ships once headed for the Mexican Rivera are rerouted to domestic destinations because of the swine flu outbreak south of the border.
Five major cruise lines with Mexican destinations have canceled calls at those ports because of the possibility that passengers could become infected and spread the virus to other passengers.
With a ship full of passengers and no place the ships can travel southward from home ports in Los Angeles, Long Beach and San Diego, some cruise lines are sending their ships north.
Royal Caribbean Cruises, for instance expects to make about a half-dozen previously unscheduled calls in Seattle in the next few weeks. The company's ships will bring 3,000 passengers on each call to tour Seattle. Carnival Cruises may do the same with some of its vessels.
Because federal law prohibits foreign-flagged vessels from serving itineraries with only U.S. destinations, those vessels calling on Seattle will also call on Victoria or Vancouver, B.C. during their cruises.
Other cruise lines, not wanting to travel the more than 2,000 miles back and forth from Southern California to Seattle and Canada, are making "technical stops" in Ensenada, Mexico and then cruising to destinations such as Santa Barbara, San Diego and Catalina in California.
Those "technical stops" are brief visits to the northern Mexico port during which no passengers or crew members leave the vessel.
Fortunate for the cruise lines, many of the vessels now deployed in the Mexican market are moving northward to cruise to Alaska for the summer from Seattle and Vancouver.
Other ports benefiting from the diversions include San Francisco and Astoria, Ore., both of which will see more ship calls than normal.
