Margarita Plaza, an office center near the Terra Linda exit off Highway 101, has just become a family affair with its purchase by two Bay Area siblings and their East Coast father.
The 30,000-square-foot plaza, with tenants including Allstate, LJ’s Deli and the Marin Association of Realtors, was purchased in December by Lisa Whitescarver, a former equity partner with real estate investment firm Hines, her brother Erik Burke and their father, Coleman Burke.
Whitescarver and her brother declined to give the sales price, which was not publicly available from the Marin County assessor’s division. The property at 36 Mitchell Blvd. was advertised for sale by Cassidy/Turley for $6.5 million.
The newest member of the San Rafael City Council is a financial adviser, father of two children, a former city parks and recreation commissioner and a volunteer coach for the Dixie Youth Soccer Association. John Gamblin, 46, may be new to the political sphere, but he hopes to revitalize downtown San Rafael and help make strides to eliminate homelessness.
Gamblin was appointed to the City Council last month to fill the remaining nearly yearlong term of Damon Connolly, who was sworn in this month as the newest county supervisor. Gamblin plans to run for an elected four-year seat in November.
Reports of the death of malls across America are an exaggeration, and nowhere is this more the case than in Marin County, experts say.
While national media are full of stories about dead and decaying malls, Marin’s four largest shopping malls — Vintage Oaks in Novato, Northgate in San Rafael, and The Village and the Town Center in Corte Madera — are slowly recovering from the recession, according to local brokers, finance directors and mall managers.
Indicators such as gradually increasing sales tax revenue, healthy rents, low vacancy rates and favorable demographics seem to bear this out, though recovery is not complete and the experts acknowledge that the move to discounts and Internet sales could cause it to stall.
Unemployment rates across the Bay Area dropped in November, compared with a year ago, according to data released Friday from the state’s Employment Development Department.
The unemployment rate in Marin County was 3.9 percent in November, down from 4.6 percent a year ago.
The unemployment rate in San Mateo County was 4.1 percent in November, down from 5.0 percent a year ago, according to EDD officials.
The two counties had the lowest unemployment rates in November of the nine-county Bay Area, which includes Alameda, Contra Costa, San Francisco, Napa, Santa Clara, Sonoma and Solano counties. EDD officials said comparing the unemployment rate on a year over year basis, rather than a month-to-month basis, is more appropriate because the unemployment data are not seasonally adjusted.
New tenants are filling once-vacant Marin storefronts, office buildings and business parks and rents are going up in Southern and Central Marin as commercial real estate continues its recovery from the recession.
Marin vacancies dropped from 22 percent to 18 percent in the third quarter of 2014 compared with the previous year, said Brian Eisberg, senior vice president at Newmark Cornish & Carey Commercial in San Rafael.
“It’s been a fairly rosy year. The market rates have gone up substantially,” Eisberg said. Southern and Central Marin rental rates are now nearly as high as they were before the recession began in 2008, he said.
After years of struggle followed by recovery, nearly every industry in Marin is growing and on course to continue slow, steady expansion for years to come, experts say.
“Marin County was recovering in 2011 and 2012, but it was really in 2013 and this year when you saw the fruits of recovery blossom throughout Marin’s various industries,” said Robert Eyler, head of the Marin Economic Forum.
“In the first few years of recovery, we saw industries connected to tech and biotech doing well, while others languished,” said Eyler, a Sonoma State University professor. In the last two years, housing, retail, manufacturing, personal services and construction have shown growth, he said.
Personal income is projected to grow at an average rate of 2.2 percent between 2014 and 2016; payroll employment shows continued growth; Marin’s taxable sales per capita are the third-highest in the state; and the median home price has hovered around $1 million all year.
The Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Novato has launched its first human clinical trial since research began at the institute in 1999 — testing the effectiveness of a drug to treat a type of cognitive impairment that often precedes Alzheimer’s disease.
Stelios Tzannis, the Buck Institute’s director of clinical sciences, said the institute decided to conduct the trials itself because of promising results in preclinical trials on mice. Tzannis said the drug has reversed memory loss in mice with the equivalent of Alzheimer’s — not just mice with “amnestic mild cognitive impairment,” which the drug is being tested on in the trial.
“After a couple of months of treatment essentially they look like normal mice,” Tzannis said. “This is pretty astonishing.”
Opponents of Novato’s Business Improvement District say they have filed a majority protest that legally compels the city to de-fund the association, and they plan to turn out en masse at Tuesday’s City Council meeting to press their point.
“If the members of the BID don’t want the BID, that certainly is a powerful argument that something is not working correctly in terms of how the BID functions,” said Robert Eyler, head of the Marin Economic Forum and a professor of economics at Sonoma State University.
Should the district be dissolved, “the interesting thing is, how will they fill this need once the BID is gone?” Eyler said.
“If it goes away, it may be more difficult for small players to market themselves. It may make it harder for the city to provide events that will generate foot traffic for downtown and hence more business,” Eyler said.
“If you think about the devastation that could happen if there is a fire, considering how tightly packed homes are in some places, it’s not a shocker that it’s a relatively risky place,” said Robert Eyler, head of the Marin Economic Forum. “Now, what may seem somewhat confounding in all this is how quickly Marin’s housing markets have recovered and how they hold their value.
“So, if there is an earthquake or fire, how quickly would Marin’s housing market recover? There is a lot of wealth in Marin and people are going to rebuild. There are up-front risks but not a lot of long-term risks per se,” Eyler said.
Marin’s economy continues to improve from the economic downturn and life sciences jobs have the potential to grow in the county if educators, elected officials and businesses work together.
This message was the focus of the 11th annual Forecasting the Future Economic Conference hosted Thursday by the San Rafael Chamber of Commerce at the Embassy Suites in San Rafael. About 200 people gathered to discuss local, regional and global trends that impact Marin businesses.
“We’re back in real terms at right about the height before the housing market crashed,” Eyler said. “Through 2017 most of the economic forecasts look pretty good.”
Marin added 2,600 payroll jobs and gained 200 payroll businesses since last year, which is not spectacular growth but still good news, Eyler said.
