Piedmont Office Realty Trust may scoot out of Phoenix's office market in the future, just as the public REIT expands its Southwest presence.
Atlanta-based Piedmont's Joe Pangburn, recently tapped by the REIT to head up Southwest operations and acquisitions from Dallas, tells us its holdings here include the 150k SF Chandler Forum off South Price Road, the 133k SF River Corporate Center (anchored by US Foods) off South River Parkway in Tempe, and Desert Canyon 300, the 149k SF office building home to Grand Canyon Education off West Peoria Avenue. Its Southwest focus is now Dallas and other hot Texas cities. (You gotta go where the action is.) That's not to say the REIT wouldn't do something in the Phoenix area, Joe says; it's more an allocation thing than anything else.
So that means Piedmont is more than likely to harvest its Phoenix metro assets (like Desert Canyon 300 pictured here) instead of beefing up a presence here, Joe says. While he says Phoenix is in many ways like Dallas and Houston—with tremendous run-ups in employment growth—“it can get overbuilt" because it's pretty easy to build here.
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