RCA in the commercial property press:

Lone Star College Could Teach Class on Timing

The Wall Street Journal reports: A spokeswoman for Hewlett-Packard, of Palo Alto, Calif., which acquired the property as part of its 2002 purchase of Compaq, declined to comment on price. In a written statement the company said the sale was part of a global effort to reduce the amount of underused space in its real-estate portfolio. The company also is seeking to sell more than a half million square feet of office space near the Lone Star property, brokers say.

The $35-a-square-foot price Lone Star paid was below the $57 average paid for the few suburban Houston office properties sold in the first quarter of 2009 and a deep discount to the $145 per-square-foot suburban average in the year-earlier first quarter, according to Real Capital Analytics, a New York-based real-estate-research firm.

The deal was the second-largest U.S. office transaction so far this year, based on square footage, after Boston's 1.8-million-square-foot John Hancock tower, according to Real Capital Analytics. The Texas property's cut-rate price underscores the beating many sellers are taking to cash out of one of the worst commercial-real-estate markets in decades, even as it highlights how some higher-education institutions have proved to be a niche source of commercial-real-estate demand.

Pete Culliney, director of research for Real Capital, says some schools have taken advantage of the downturn to buy properties, particularly apartments, while many skittish or cash-poor investors remain on the sidelines. Among the larger recent buys by schools: The Regents of the University of California, the governing body for the 10-campus University of California system, paid $53 million in February for a 211,000-square-foot office building in Berkeley, Calif., to use partly for adult and continuing-education classes. The Lone Star purchase was driven in part by the growing demand for its affordable higher education. The publicly supported college system has seen its enrollment climb nearly 40% in the past five years.