Cushman & Wakefield has fortified its office in North Carolina's research triangle with the addition of a veteran pair of brokers to market and lease properties in an area where vacancies in office and industrial properties have increased but retail availability has tightened.
The brokerage said Monday it hired Amy Watkins and Kaler Moseley, who combined have more than 40 years of commercial real estate experience, as managing directors on Cushman & Wakefield's Raleigh-Durham agency leasing team based in the Fenton mixed-use development in Cary, North Carolina. In their new roles, Watkins and Moseley, who joined Cushman & Wakefield from Lincoln Property Co., will focus on representing owners across several property types, the firm said.
The addition of the pair will help expand business in the area, said Chad Love, managing principal of Cushman & Wakefield’s Raleigh-Durham office.
Watkins and Moseley move to Cushman & Wakefield at a time when office and industrial landlords contend with increasing vacancy rates in office and industrial properties. The office vacancy rate in Raleigh has increased to 10.1%, according to CoStar data.
In the first quarter, "demand for office space in Raleigh remains muted," according to a CoStar Market Analytics report. "That lower demand, combined with abundant new" completions, has caused the market's vacancy rate to rise well above its historical average."
Raleigh's industrial market also has cooled because of a combination of below-average demand and above-average completion of new space. according to a CoStar industrial market report: "Raleigh's vacancy rate has risen for two quarters in a row and is now 6.0%, which is very similar to the U.S. vacancy rate of 5.8%." About 18 months ago, the Raleigh vacancy rate was about 1% lower than the national average, so Raliegh's vacancies are rising faster than the national increase, the report found.
Another positive trend in the market is Raleigh's ability to keep luring investment from technology and life science companies such as Bandwidth, a software communications company that completed a 533,000-square-foot headquarters campus in West Raleigh, according to CoStar.
While serving as vice presidents at Lincoln, Moseley and Watkins marketed life science properties, including a five-building campus with about 445,000 square feet of space in Triangle Business Center in Durham, North Carolina.
Before working at Lincoln for more than a dozen years, Moseley served as a leasing representative at Raleigh-based real estate investment trust Highwoods Properties. Watkins, who was at Lincoln for six years, previously worked as senior director of retail services at real estate services firm CASTO and vice president of retail services at York Properties.