Brandywine Realty Trust closed 2013 with the best results in its 20-year history. Using a multiyear portfolio repositioning strategy, it pivoted almost seamlessly from its suburban office roots of the 1990s to focus on urban centers. Today, its urban and town center properties (those located in mixed-use areas and/or with access to transit) represent 48 percent of its portfolio and over 67 percent of its net operating income.

Situated at the base of Denver’s Millennium Bridge, across from Denver Union Station, sits DaVita’s new corporate headquarters. The iconic building, standing 14 stories in the Central Platte Valley District, has reshaped the downtown skyline and set a new precedent for world-class office accommodations.

Switching sites, revising drawings and redesigning systems three months into the project schedule for a complicated, 282,000-square-foot state-of-the art distribution center should have stressed the project’s schedule and budget. Yet the refrigerated, LEED Gold facility in Puslinch, Ontario, was completed on schedule and on budget.

The way people work is changing, and law firms like Kilpatrick Townsend are leading the charge in creating workspaces that accommodate advances in technology and meet employees’ new expectations of office space. Law firms must abandon traditional workspace in order to work more efficiently and to attract and retain clients and top talent.

The good news coming out of I.CON: The Industrial Conference, held in Jersey City, New Jersey, on June 5-6, is that everyone loves industrial. The not-so-good-news is that there is fierce competition for properties and continuing cap rate compression is driving the numbers into the 4s.

LabCentral, a shared incubator space for biotech startups that first opened for business in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in November 2013, could serve as a model for a new type of building tenant. Founded by doctor-turned-entrepreneur Johannes Fruehauf and life science investor Peter Parker, with help from the Cambridge Innovation Center, the facility offers researchers shared laboratory facilities as well as offices, conference rooms, seminars and professional services.

Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) is a new approach to financing clean energy generation and energy-efficiency improvements. With PACE, a local property tax jurisdiction can help finance these types of projects.

Office space in walkable urban areas commands a 74 percent price-per-square-foot premium over rents for office space in suburban business parks accessible only by cars, according to “Foot Traffic Ahead: Ranking Walkable Urbanism in America’s Largest Metros.” And that rent premium is growing. “Rent premiums of this magnitude reflect pent up demand for walkable urban office space,” the report notes.