PhillyDeals: Suburban 'trophy' office price down from 2006 peak

California-based

KBS Real Estate Investment Trust Inc.

said it paid $73 million, or $326 a square foot, for the eight-story Five Tower Bridge office building in West Conshohocken. Builder

Oliver Tyrone Pulver Corp.

and financier

Cornerstone Real Estate Advisers L.L.C.

, sellers, had asked around $78 million.

The sale "speaks well for the market," Fahey added. "In a real estate market weaker than it's been in five or six years, the best buildings in the best submarkets are still commanding very healthy pricing," while lesser buildings are "under pressure."

SevOne Inc.

, a Newark, Del., firm that tracks corporate data traffic through its PAS-brand software, says it's landed

Comcast Corp.

as its largest client.

SevOne replaced "a slow and tedious process" for reporting data with SevOne's "instant access to locally based, real-time reports," while saving Comcast 75 percent of its previous expense, Comcast director of network surveillance Jeff Gill said in a statement issued by SevOne.

SevOne was started by a group of Delaware bank-data techs who moonlighted as adjunct computer-programming faculty at the University of Delaware, said president Michael Phelan. They got investment backing last year from Robert S. Adelson's Osage Ventures, Philadelphia, SunGard Data Systems Inc. founder John Ryan, and others. SevOne also lists Chase Credit Card Services, Credit Suisse, New York University and Thomson Reuters as clients.

SevOne employs 30 at the Delaware Technology Park at UD's campus. Its UD graduate programmers can bike to work, instead of moving to Silicon Valley, Phelan said.

Comcast Corp. has less debt, given its size, than

Verizon Communications Inc.

or other big telecom companies. But it will still suffer in this recession from lower advertising sales, higher financing costs, and "serious ill will" from "hard-pressed customers" whose "bills have simply gotten very high," writes

Craig Moffett

, senior telecommunications analyst at

Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. L.L.C.

, of New York. Moffett estimates the average Comcast subscriber pays $111 per month.

As crippled banks have pulled back on loans to U.S. businesses,

Campus Apartments Inc.

chief executive officer

David J. Adelman

and Philadelphia lawyer-turned- private-equity- investor

Michael J. Forman

are trying to pick up some of the slack with their new business-investment company,

FS Investment Corp.

FS won permission last month from the Securities and Exchange Commission to raise up to $1.5 billion to finance senior secured loans, second-lien loans, and subordinate loans to small and middle-market companies. "Now is a great time to be bringing fresh capital to this market," Adelman said. "The credit markets pay 7 to 10 percent." The government is funding banks for just 5 percent, but Forman doesn't see that as competition.

Now all they have to do is persuade small investors to share their vision, in minimum investments of $5,000. They're targeting the "mass affluent," people who might invest $50,000 of a $1 million portfolio for several years, Forman said.

FS has hired GSO Debt Funds Management, a unit of the Blackstone Group L.P., to "source and underwrite" potential deals, Forman said. "They have a huge pipeline," Forman said. "There are vast opportunities."

Nearly 13,000 troubled borrowers flooded the branch offices of the nonprofit Consumer Credit Counseling Service of the Delaware Valley for free guidance on how to manage their personal debt in the first nine months of this year, up from 9,600 last year.

"One of the top reasons people are coming to see us is income loss, often due to job loss," said president Patricia Hasson.

It's not just hard times. Hasson blames, in part, "the policy of 'homeownership for everybody,' where people did not have to save for down payments. People lose the habit of saving for an emergency. If you don't have savings, you're not going to be ready when an emergency happens. And it will."

Like other nonprofit counselors, CCCS reviews a client's income, debt and expenses, and suggests an action plan. Sometimes it appeals to home mortgage and credit card lenders to ease loan terms. "We're seeing more loan services willing to work with counseling agencies," Hasson said.

Among credit card lenders, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc., HSBC Holdings P.L.C. and Bank of America Corp. are among the more reasonable.