Roosevelt University in Chicago has its institutional eyes focused on an ambitious building project that’s starting to come online: a “vertical campus,” a $118 million, 32-story, 413,000-square-foot building that includes student housing.

Starwood Property Trust has just originated a $170 million first-mortgage loan on a 600,000-square-foot complex that will be called One SoHo Square in the city’s Midtown district.

Debt financing has returned to the commercial real estate markets, deleveraging will likely continue over the next few years and the stream of distressed loans will continue to flow into the market, according to speakers on financing panels at the 2012 ULI Spring Meeting held last week in Charlotte, N.C.

With no signs of weakness in Northern Virginia’s data-center market, Digital Realty Trust is preparing to expand its Northern Virginia campus in Ashburn, Va. The REIT has just kicked off construction of a 214,000-square-foot facility at the complex.

Aveo Pharmaceuticals just inked a lease for 126,000 square feet of laboratory and office space at BioMed Realty Trust’s 280,000-square-foot property at 650 E. Kendall St., marking another life-sciences transaction in the Cambridge, Mass., market.

In a transaction valued at approximately $289 million, Glimcher has acquired an 80 percent indirect interest in Pearlridge Center, a 1 million-square-foot shopping mall in the community of Aiea, in metropolitan Honolulu.

Kilroy Realty Corp. continues its expansion into the San Francisco Bay Area with its second Silicon Valley acquisition in three months. The REIT will invest about $200 million in the build-to-suit, 341,000-square-foot office campus for Synopsys Inc.

American Realty Advisors has just snapped up the newly built, 80,000-square-foot retail village at Hunter Properties’ $350 million @First mixed-use development in San Jose.

“Ken was a visionary,” Stan Ross, chairman of the University of Southern California Lusk Center for Real Estate, said to Commercial Property Executive about his longtime friend and colleague, the late Kenneth Leventhal.

Boston’s most recent transaction is the $40 million purchase of One Faneuil Hall, an eight-story, 44,287-square-foot retail-and-office building, by a foreign investor.