Tuesday, February 10, 2026
Monday, February 9, 2026
Amazon plans to demolish vacant King of Prussia office building for new warehouse
By Paul Schwedelson – Reporter, Philadelphia Business Journal
Amazon.com Inc. plans to demolish a vacant office building in King of Prussia and replace it with a 99,300-square-foot warehouse.
The e-commerce giant would occupy the future warehouse at 760 Moore Road, just off West Valley Forge Road. The site is a half-mile from Route 422 and near both I-276 and I-76.
The last-mile delivery station is planned to facilitate deliveries to Montgomery and Chester counties, Amazon spokesperson Smitha Rao said in an email.
Upper Merion Township Planning Officer Jarrett Lash said Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) plans to use its electric vehicle fleet at the site.
A 260,000-square-foot office building on the 25-acre property would be demolished, according to plans submitted to Upper Merion Township.
Amazon purchased 760 Moore Road in June 2021 for $26.5 million, Montgomery County property records show.
O’Neill Properties Group, now MLP Ventures, bought the building when it housed a vacant warehouse in 2000. The developer converted the building into office space and then sold it in 2002 for $27.9 million to PFPC Inc., a division of PNC Financial Services Group, which later came under the purview of Bank of New York Mellon Corp.
BNY Mellon used the building as an operations center for almost two decades before selling the property in April 2021 for $24 million to E. Kahn Development. At the time, the Moore Road site drew interest from investors looking to convert it for life sciences use or back to warehouse space. E. Kahn Development owned the site for just two months before selling it to Amazon for $2.5 million more than it paid to acquire the property.
Despite owning the vacant property for nearly five years, Amazon hasn’t moved forward with development until now. The plans come as the e-commerce giant said last week that it is cutting 16,000 jobs in the company's second major round of layoffs in recent months. That includes closing all of its Amazon Fresh grocery stores, resulting in nearly 1,000 layoffs across six stores in the Philadelphia area.
Full story: https://www.bizjournals.com/philadelphia/news/2026/02/05/amazon-warehouse-king-of-prussia-last-mile.html
Insurance giant Cigna downsizes half its downtown Philadelphia hub
By Katie Burke CoStar News
One of the nation's largest insurance companies is adopting a shrunken real estate strategy, most recently with a move to offload more than half its space in a Philadelphia high-rise.
Bloomfield, Connecticut-based Cigna has leveraged a recent renewal period to downsize its space in Center City's Two Liberty Place tower to less than 165,250 square feet. The move dissolves nearly 141,000 square feet from the company's previous presence in the 37-story tower.
It's the latest shift the insurance behemoth has made among its offices across the United States as it continues to tweak its vast real estate portfolio in response to changes still rippling out from the pandemic that prompted nationwide shutdowns starting in 2020.
Cigna's cuts started with the downsizing of a 185,000-square-foot outpost in Visalia, California, that ultimately resulted in its permanent closure in 2022. It has since moved out of the 682,000-square-foot Bloomfield, Connecticut, building that previously served as its global headquarters, and has made other changes to its Connecticut headquarters over the past several years.
The company was formed in 1982 through the merger of Philadelphia's Insurance Company of North America and the Connecticut General Life Insurance Company.
Cigna has cut thousands of employees from its corporate workforce between 2023 and 2025, all part of a multipronged approach to reduce its real estate expenses in response to the shift toward a more remote or hybrid workforce.
Market is looking up
Even considering the downsizing, Cigna remains Two Liberty Place's largest tenant, by far.
The company initially moved into the Philadelphia tower after signing a more than 306,175-square-foot lease in 2019, a deal that amounted to about half of the roughly 951,500-square-foot skyscraper.
Yet that was signed shortly before the pandemic sent the national office market in a tailspin, leaving tenants scrambling to adapt to the impacts of flexible and hybrid work policies, arrested hiring plans and layoffs, among other shifts induced by the global health crisis.
That has especially been the case for tenants such as Cigna that locked into deals in the run-up to the 2020 outbreak.
Thursday, February 5, 2026
Brandywine to kick off $300 million sales strategy alongside improving office market
By Katie Burke CoStar News
Office tenants, for the first time in years, are committing to more office space than they're planning to offload. One of Philadelphia's largest landlords is making sure it's best positioned to capitalize on the upswing by trimming its portfolio to focus on its best-performing properties.
Brandywine Realty Trust is preparing to sell off up to $300 million of its portfolio throughout the remainder of the year, following a strategy other major landlords across the United States are deploying in an effort to strengthen their position alongside the recovering market.
For the Philadelphia-based firm, that plan is based on what Chief Executive Officer Jerry Sweeney says is improving lease economics and the ongoing spike in demand for top-tier office properties.
Yet as tenants flip back into leasing mode, their attention has primarily been concentrated on the highest end of the office-quality spectrum.
The landlord, for example, has pulled out of the Washington, D.C.-area office market due to slow leasing activity; but in Austin, Texas, it landed a large anchor deal last year with AI chipmaker Nvidia for a just-built office building as part of Brandywine's Uptown ATX mixed-use project.
"Our 2026 business plan is very straightforward and highlighted by solid core portfolio performance and strong leasing activity," the CEO told analysts on the REIT's earnings call Wednesday. "We experienced increased tour levels in all of our core markets and continued to experience good conversion rate from these tours. We're projecting positive net absorption for the first time in several years as another evidence of an improving market."
The national vacancy rate of about 14% has largely hit its peak, according to CoStar research. While U.S. office leasing has yet to fully recover to pre-pandemic levels, the 12 million square feet of deals signed in the third quarter is the most since 2019.
The uptick in leasing over the past year has also closed the gulf between occupied and leased rates, a residual sticking point for landlords that have struggled in recent years to backfill large blocks of space that tenants ditched in the pandemic.
Dealmaking mode
The REIT, one of the largest publicly traded office owners and developers in the United States, finalized nearly 1.6 million square feet of office deals last year across both its wholly owned and joint-venture portfolios.
It operates a portfolio largely focused on the greater Philadelphia and Austin, Texas, areas. Its footprint of about 120 properties across roughly 20 million square feet was just shy of 90.5% leased by year-end 2025, a figure that outpaced its 88.3% occupancy rate given the lag time between when a tenant commits to space and when they officially move into it.
Brandywine executives are targeting a slight boost to both figures by the end of this year, with its leased rate goal set to about 91%.
While it didn't provide specifics as to what or where, the company's disposition strategy this year is shoring up its financial position, with "sales proceeds used to reduce leverage, period," Sweeney said. That has become especially important as the landlord has seen strengthened leasing momentum in its core Philadelphia and Austin markets.
"We’ve really been able to drive effective rents there, and that’s really a function of demand levels returning to pre-COVID levels," the CEO said. Last year "we saw the highest level of new deal volume in the past five years, so certainly things seem to be accelerating, the inventory is shrinking, and there have been a number of properties that are either in some level of financial strain or in the process of being evaluated for residential conversion."
In other words, supply is dwindling at a point when tenant interest is beginning to gain steam, and Brandywine wants to ensure its prepared to accommodate it. Executives pointed to improving capital markets and strengthening valuations — both trendlines expected to extend throughout 2026.
"We have half a billion dollars of assets on the balance sheet that aren’t generating a lot of return right now," Sweeney said of the REIT's focus on the year ahead. "We think as that leases up, we’ll be in great shape. All the key ingredients are here to get back to investment-grade metrics and stabilize these development projects, all while we’re recycling assets to generate additional liquidity but also maintaining good operating portfolio performance."
