| There's a shortfall of data center space, and the lack of supply will continue, according to Digital Realty Trust CEO Michael Foust, one of dozens of REIT top execs who spoke at REITWorld yesterday in New York City at the Waldorf-Astoria. | |
| Our NY reporter Amanda Marsh snapped Michael, here with Digital Realty Trust CFO William Stein. The growth of new applications— think cloud computing, data archiving, customer relationship management, and e-mail—is still driving demand for this space. Two-thirds of its leasing activity has been existing tenants expanding, they note—it counts Facebook, Zynga (Farmville, for you addicts), and Fortune 100 firms among its clients. Although DRT is concentrated around its tenants in areas like NY, NJ, Northern Virginia, Dallas, Phoenix, and Silicon Valley, it notes high growth overseas, including Asia and Australia. Many of its recent acquisition deals have been off-market, including two large portfolio deals, but its pipeline will focus on smaller, single, income-producing assets in the US, with $200M to $240M to spend in ?11. | |
| Self-storage may not be recession proof (people hide their cash in mattresses, not storage units), but it's certainly recession resistant, according to Public Storage CFO John Reyes and CEO Ronald Havner Jr. (with NAREIT's Kurt Walten, left). The REIT only dropped 4% (many fell as much as 90%), bottoming during Q4 '09, and has experienced an uptick since. This was the first time it experienced such a drop, they add. In Q3, its 2,000 facilities in 38 states saw a move-in volume of 15,000, a 7% increase year-over-year. Year-to -date, Public Storage has invested in 40 storage facilities totaling 25M SF (paying an average of $90/SF) and will spend $15M more by year end, they say. Many of the assets that Public Storage has purchased are bank foreclosures, which are cheaper to acquire and fix than to develop from the ground up. They're particularly watching growth in the Southeast and the West Coast. |
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