When the Halloween decorations start showing up at Giant Eagle, the contracting season is usually wrapping up for the year. This year, however, there are a number of big projects on the street (and in the pipeline) that the market is making up for the lower number of projects with a much bigger dollar volume.

Part of this is the result of the lag from announcement to construction for some of the big projects that have been in the news over the past year or so.  Mascaro took bids recently on the 410,000 square foot, $350 million UPMC Mercy Vision & Rehabilitation Hospital and the 96,000 square foot TCS Building at CMU. PJ Dick has been bidding the 300,000 square foot Bakery Square 3 office building.

There’s also been a flurry of activity on large projects at the early stages of development.  Hanna Langholz Wilson Ellis is marketing the 1,200-acre Zediker Station site, which sits along I-70 just east of I-79. It’s the largest development site in PA and may be the only one served by both CSX and Norfolk Southern. The Hazelwood Green project has been advertised for developer proposals. Over the long haul, that’s a project that could lead to more than $1 billion in construction. The developer currently on site, RIDC, has reportedly locked up autonomous vehicle company Aptiv for 70,000 square feet to occupy most of the 2nd building in its Mill 19 project. That would trigger the start of the third 90,000 +/- square foot final phase. In the Strip District, Facebook confirmed that it was leasing most or all of District 15, a 105,000 square foot building being developed by RDC on Smallman Street. According to a recent story by Tim Schooley in the Business Times Facebook’s lease is the tip of the iceberg. Schooley quotes JLL’s Dan Adamski estimating that there are 900,000 square feet of user requirements being shopped in the Strip now. That would make for another explosion of office projects. One of those may be JMC Holdings’s proposed adaptation of the Wholey cold storage building on 15th Street. The developer has engaged Desmone Architects to work on a 350,000 square foot re-use but is reported to be looking at hiring an architect to design a new 17-story, 500,000 square foot building on the site.

As intriguing as this tech demand is, it’s worth noting that most, if not all, of it is new in 2018. It was only last year that occupants like Apple and Argo AI were snatching up big chunks of 3 Crossings. When someone says that the emerging technology sector is growing faster than you can understand, this is what they mean.