Portman Holdings is back in the US. With a vengeance. We chatted with Portman leasing director Travis Garland (here with his cousin Daniel in Jamaica) who will be a panelist at our Atlanta Office event, 7:30am, Tuesday, June 23, at the St. Regis in Buckhead. Travis says back in 2011, Portman was predicting that China's rapid-growth economy was finally about to slow down, while at the same time, America was finally dusting off the vestiges of the recession and entering growth mode. So it sold out of its last Chinese projects a year ago (although it's still very involved in design work in the Asian continent), and is focused on the US, including ballyhooed projects here in Atlanta: the redevelopment of 230 Peachtree and the Georgia Tech High Performance Computing Center.

Right now Portman's working on two hotel developments in San Diego, a smaller 100k SF office project and 180-key hotel in Denver, and was just awarded a convention center hotel project in Miami Beach, Travis says. And the firm is scouting for urban mixed-use deals across the country. “Obviously the focus right now is hotel and office,” he says. But only deals that fit into Portman's target of big, complex projects, such as Tech's 750k SF Midtown tower (here). Hear more from Travis, along with Daniel Corp's Steve Baile, Hines Interests' John Heagy, Jamestown Properties' Jim Irwin and Cushman & Wakefield's Ken Ashley at our Atlanta Office event at the St. Regis on June 23. Register here.