The Minneapolis office of CBRE Group Inc.says it has been hired to review the space needs and options for Young America LLC, the marketing and fulfillment firm in Norwood Young America. That could mean the sale or lease of the firm's corporate headquarters in Norwood Young America.

The 166,000-square-foot office and warehouse complex, which has been the firm's home for more than 40 years, is located off Hwy 212. Young America would consider an outright sale, or a lease, of the headquarters. Young America's marketing and IT division, currently located in Edina, may be combined into a new headquarters operation, as well

The company said its real-estate footprint needs have "changed dramatically. . . .We simply don’t need large-scale warehouse space in today’s market,” said, President Joe Custer.

Janet Moore covers commercial real estate for the Star Tribune.

There’s another sign that it’s becoming a seller’s market in parts of the Twin Cities. Pending home sales in the Twin Cities metro got a 20-percent boost last month, rising to the highest level since 2005. New listings were up during the month, as was the median sale price, which was 15 percent higher than last year. Here’s a summary of the data:

• Pending sales were up 18.5 percent to 5,872.
• New listings rose 26.2 percent to 8,332 units.
• Total inventory stood at 14,375 properties, 22.3 percent fewer than in May 2012, but 11.6 percent more than in January 2013.
• The median sales price of all closings last month was up 15.1 percent to $194,450, the highest median sales price since August 2008.

A new series on HGTV called "Renovate to Rent" that will premier tonight (Tuesday, June 11) was filmed entirely in Minnesota and will follows the house-hunting - and renovation - antics of Twin Cities-based real estate investors, Drew Levin and Danny Perkins.

Each of the eight episodes will feature Levin and Perkins as they hunt for the right investment property, renovate it & try to rent it out for top dollar. Perkins and Levin, longtime business partners, said that a Minnesota connection helped them land the program, which ends with a financial break-down of the property featured on that episode.

Levin, a real estate agent, and Perkins, a general contractor, aren't new to the business world. They were Minnesota’s 2013 Young Entrepreneurs of the Year for their efforts launching the first bricks-and-mortar venue for the Turkey-to-Go concept first launched at the Minnesota State Fair in 1959.

Another hotel has been proposed for downtown Minneapolis.

This time, it's a 210-room Hampton Inn & Suites slated for Eighth St. N. and First Av. S. 

Minneapolis-based ESG Architects will present preliminary plans to the Downtown Minneapolis Neighborhood Association on Tuesday night. Mortenson Development is the developer on the project. 

Details are scant at this point. A Mortenson spokesman says the number of rooms could change, and he declined to release how much the project will cost.

Janet Moore covers commercial real estate for the Star Tribune.

Starting this week prospective home buyers in Minnesota and western Wisconsin will have an easier way of assessing which houses on the market have certain energy efficiency features. Sort of like checking the MPG when shopping for a new car.

The NorthstarMLS (Multiple Listing Service) and the Builders Association of the Twin Cities (BATC) have starting added new fields for the the HERS (home energy rating system) rating and various types of green-certification .

BATC endorsed the idea and lobbied hard for it based on consumer research it did when developing MN Green Path, its two-year-old green certification and energy-testing program.

 “Our agents have made it very clear that information on energy ratings and green features are very important to their homebuyer clients,” said John Mosey, President of NorthstarMLS. “We concluded that adding these two fields and accompanying documentation to our home listings is the most effective way to offer a simple yet powerful tool for Realtors to better meet the needs of their individual clients.”

The HERS score, by the way, is the a home’s energy efficiency is measured, and it was developed by RESNET, an independent, non-profit organization that sets national standards for energy ratings, ensuring accuracy and consistency. The topic of energy efficiency and building standards will gain even more urgency when Minnesota adopts the next generation of building codes sometime next year - that new code will like include energy testing.

I've had a string of recent stories about boom times for Twin Cities-area builders, but as any builder, remodeler or subcontractor will tell you, things aren't what they used to be. There's a terrific analysis in the NYT that's puts the situation in context, following is an excerpt. You can see the full story by clicking here.

From the NYT's:

Home construction is booming in the United States, but it remains severely depressed.

That seemingly contradictory statement was illustrated by construction spending statistics issued this week by the Census Bureau. In April, spending on the construction of new houses and apartment buildings reached an annual rate of $195 billion.

As can be seen in the accompanying charts, spending on home building is up 40 percent over the last year. That is the largest such increase since the early 1980s. In the housing boom that preceded the Great Recession, such spending never rose more than 25 percent over a 12-month period. But that rate of spending is down more than 60 percent from the peak, reached in 2006, and is lower than spending as far back as 1997. The figures are not adjusted for inflation.

Were they so adjusted, the current level of spending would be even lower compared with the pace of building in past years. The charts are based on three-month averages of annual rates, in an effort to smooth out fluctuations caused by weather. Over all, total construction spending is running at an annual rate of about $861 billion, or 28 percent less than the 2006 peak.