Phoenix

The stretch of office towers along Camelback Road between roughly 16th and 24th Streets has carried the city's premium financial, legal, and professional-services tenants for decades, and rents there still price above anything downtown or in Midtown can command. A buyer should confirm how much of a Camelback building's roster is genuinely investment-grade tenant credit versus smaller regional firms riding the address, since the two carry meaningfully different renewal risk even in the same building.

Tenant improvement allowances in this corridor also run higher than the Valley average, since incoming tenants expect a finish level that matches the address. A buyer underwriting a near-term rollover should budget for that cost rather than assuming a light refresh will hold a Camelback-quality tenant.

Downtown high-rise office is still working through post-2020 occupancy softness, and a buyer should pull current physical occupancy rather than leased square footage before underwriting any downtown tower, since the gap between the two numbers can be wide. Midtown has fared better, largely on the strength of medical and biomedical tenants clustered around the hospital campuses and the growing bioscience presence near the Central Avenue corridor, where lab-capable buildouts have kept vacancy tighter than the downtown towers a few miles south.

A seller marketing a Midtown medical office building should expect a deeper, steadier buyer pool than a comparable downtown office seller, simply because that tenant base has proven more durable through the recent cycle.

Industrial land and buildings ringing Sky Harbor International Airport serve air cargo, freight forwarding, and last-mile distribution tenants who need to sit close to the runway, and this stock trades to a different buyer pool than the bulk distribution product farther out in the West Valley. A buyer should ask specifically about FAA height restrictions and any airport-authority easements before assuming a parcel can be built to the same specs as a comparable site elsewhere in the metro.

Far north Phoenix, particularly around Deer Valley Airport and the Loop 101 corridor near I-17, has absorbed a wave of advanced manufacturing and supply-chain tenants drawn in part by the semiconductor investment landing in the northern Valley, and industrial land pricing there has moved up accordingly over the past several years. A buyer identifying replacement property in this corridor should confirm power capacity and water availability early, since some parcels here still need real infrastructure work before a tenant can occupy. Replacement candidates a Phoenix seller will typically see across the city include:

• Class A and B office towers along the Camelback Corridor
• Medical and lab-capable office in Midtown near the hospital campuses
• Air cargo and last-mile industrial buildings near Sky Harbor
• Advanced manufacturing and flex space near Deer Valley Airport and the Loop 101
• Grocery-anchored and net lease retail serving Phoenix's older, built-out neighborhoods

A seller exiting a Camelback Corridor office building is usually chasing a deep, well-understood buyer pool and can often build a tighter three-property list, since comparable Class A office trades fairly often across the Valley. A seller exiting Sky Harbor-adjacent industrial or Deer Valley manufacturing land typically benefits more from the 200% rule, naming a broader mix of industrial, land, and DST candidates, since that stock trades in smaller volume and a like-for-like match is not always available inside the identification window.

Because Phoenix spans so many submarkets under one city name, I generally tell sellers to be explicit about which submarket a candidate property sits in when building an identification list, rather than assuming every listing labeled "Phoenix" behaves the same way.