Construction has commenced on the first phase of The Campus at Playa Vista, a new 1.2 billion, 1.6 million-square-foot office complex in West Los Angeles that is being developed by Tishman Speyer on behalf of its joint venture with Walton Street Capital L.L.C. The initial segment of the project (pictured) will bring 325,000 square feet [...]

Nearly two years after its first shares were offered for sale, KBS Real Estate Investment Trust Inc. has closed. The non-traded REIT raised $1.67 billion and bought $1.65 billion in income-producing commercial real estate and other assets, bringing the total acquisitions to more than $2.1 billion. With KBS Capital Markets Group as its dealer manager, [...]

After the events of the past month, the leadership of Grubb & Ellis Co. may welcome some peace and quiet this summer. In what could be the capper in a series of personnel shufflings, former board chairman Anthony Thompson, who helped engineer a blockbuster merger with NNN Realty Advisors and is still the company’s second-largest [...]

Kennedy Wilson has agreed to purchase a 16-story office tower in Los Angeles. The building, 6100 Wilshire, is located adjacent to Beverly Hills at the southwest corner for Wilshire and Fairfax. Financial details of the deal were not revealed.The 214,000-square-foot property is currently 85 percent occupied by tenants including CBS, Ovation, World Link, Fulfillment Fund, [...]

Spanish real estate powerhouse Inmobiliaria Colonial SA has reaffirmed its commitment to selling its 15 percent stake in Fomento de Construcciones y Contratas SA (FCC), Spain’s third-largest construction company, according to a Bloomberg report. At the end of March, CPN had covered press reports that FCC was trying to pull together a plan [...]

After a nearly 10-month delay that followed a fatal fire last summer, cleanup of the contaminated Deutsche Bank building at the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan is proceeding full speed ahead, a top Downtown official said yesterday. At a meeting of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., board chairman Avi Shick said that contractors [...]

It’s been a long time coming, but San Francisco’s Transbay Terminal is set to break ground this year. Ultimately, the plans to redevelop a blighted and underutilized transit terminal and dilapidated area promise to bring extended rail access, jobs, housing and other real estate uses to the city, according to Transbay Joint Powers Authority executive [...]

Keep It Simple Stupid. One of the most effective ways to order your world is to simplify everything you encounter. The problem is that keeping it simple often becomes very difficult when our basic human nature is to overcomplicate everything we touch. In thinking about the people I respect the most, to the one they [...]

Reed Construction Data today announced their latest figures on the value of recent U.S. construction starts, and while those numbers are pretty unsightly, at least they shouldn’t be surprising. From January through May, according to Reed, starts were down 5.9 percent from the same period in 2007, continuing a downward trend that started in the [...]

Can Chicago’s Tribune Tower sell, even in a market as sluggish for investment sales as the current one? Tribune Co. and real estate mogul Sam Zell didn’t address that question directly, but he did say that an attempted sale of the Chicago property, along with the company’s office building in Los Angeles, is well within [...]