The sale of Overlook Manor Apartments and Lafarge North America’s quarry holdings boost 1st quarter commercial real estate sales.
Frederick’s commercial real estate market came out of the gate in 2014 with a strong first quarter. On a dollar volume basis, 
commercial real estate sales for the first quarter of 2014 increased over 65% from the same time period of 2013. The total number of transactions, which is a better measure of overall activity in the market, continues to increase at a slow but steady pace. The total number of commercial real estate sales transactions increased about 10% over the first quarter of 2013.
There were two large transactions–the sale of Overlook Manor Apartments ($23, 050,000) and Lafarge North America‘s quarry operations ($17,205,000)–that contributed to the large dollar volume increase during the quarter. Watch for an upcoming MacRo Report post on the top five deals of Q1 2014 to learn more.
Following are some statistics tracking the first quarter performance of Frederick’s commercial real estate market for the past several years. Given that the number of quarterly transactions occur in the dozens rather than the hundreds, sales per square foot for each different market segment have a pretty wide range between high and low prices. This small sample size renders a price per square foot average statistically meaningless, so we are reporting median prices per square foot instead.
The author: Kathy Krach is a commercial sales and leasing agent with MacRo.