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Bethesda-based Pebblebrook Hotel Trust, which priced a secondary offering of $17 per share on July 22, said the offering’s underwriters exercised an option to purchase an additional 2.55 million shares.

With the additional share purchases, the net proceeds will be about $318 million, after subtracting the underwriting discount and other costs associated with the offering.

The offering is set to close July 28.

Pebblebrook (NYSE: PEB) said the money it raises will be used to invest in hotel properties and for general corporate purposes Low fee payday loans.

The underwriters purchase of 2.55 million shares comes on top of the offering’s original 17 million shares, which were expected to bring net proceeds of about $277 million.

The joint book-running managers of the offering are Raymond James & Associates Inc. and Bank of America Merrill Lynch. The co-managers are Baird, Credit Agricole CIB, Janney Montgomery Scott and Piper Jaffray.

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A grocery store. Restaurants. A wine bar. Renovated apartments and office space. And a badly neglected movie theater restored into a new nonprofit independent film center.

Those were the ideas four developers pitched to a large and eager crowd of North Side residents at the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh Monday night, on how they would redevelop the focal block of long dilapidated property on North Street in front of Allegheny Commons Park.

The developers — Lawrenceville-based Barron CRE; Spokane, Wash.-based Wells and Company, suburban Philadelphia-based Zukin Realty and locally-based Aaron Stubna — presented their plans for the block best known for the looming presence of the Garden Theater. The neighborhood movie theater was originally built in 1915, but has become an image of blight for decades thanks to its use as a pornographic movie house.

With the theater now long closed and the entire block under the ownership of the Urban Redevelopment Authority, a nonprofit organization called North Side Tomorrow is now leading the effort to choose a developer to take on the block of property.

“This is a good problem to have,” emphasized Kirk Burkley, board president for NorthSide Tomorrow. “We could be here today with (no developers). And we have five.”

The fifth developer, James Welker, was unable to attend Monday's meeting.

The first presentation by Bill Barron proposed tearing down the bulk of the auditorium for the Garden Theater, leaving a restored facade, as required by city historic standards, developing the theater’s front into a restaurant, freeing up space behind it for parking while redeveloping the rest of the surrounding buildings into 34 apartments.

Barron acknowledged up front that he expected the plan to be controversial, his plan calling for the URA to ensure the stability of some of the other long neglected property before taking them on as redevelopment projects. He expects to pursue the remaining four-story Bradberry and Mason Hall buildings as viable redevelopment projects, using the remaining space from eliminating the Garden Theater auditorium to provide dedicated parking for each of the apartment units.

Wells and Company has done many historic redevelopments in Downtown Spokane and have become familiar with Pittsburgh thanks in part to their relationship with Mike Edwards, CEO of the Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership. Edwards served in a similar role with Downtown Spokane’s business improvement district.

Wells proposed pursuing the development under the ownership of a separate nonprofit ownership entity, and then leasing the property for a 50-year term, enabling them to structure financing and development plans to better access historic tax credits and other forms of a assistance.

The company wants to restore the theater and make it available to local arts groups while doing historic rehabs to all the surrounding buildings. Their plan calls for developing as many as 100 apartment units on the site, a number predicated on whether or not the considerably damaged properties on the eastern edge of the block that runs up Federal Street are deemed too far gone to rehabilitate.

If not, Wells plans to develop four-story apartment building there with first-floor retail, a project estimated to cost $10.1 million. If the can be restored, the total project by Wells would call for between 50 and 70 apartments. Their total project cost estimate was between $15 million and $20 million.

Zukin Realty Company, which first became familiar with the Pittsburgh market after it bought the Forbes and Murray building occupied by Vivisimo in 2006 for $11.46 million, also proposed redeveloping only the facade and front portion of the Garden Theater building for a new 5,000 square foot grocery. Wayne Zukin, who has developed historic property in Philadelphia and West Chester, Pa., emphasized an approach based on establishing local independent retailers and restaurants and doing basic rehabilitations of all the buildings that are already in place in the Garden Theater block, adding between 35 and 40 apartments. He estimated his total development cost at between $8 million to $10 million.

Stubna, working with partner Bill Porko, only expressed interest in the theater itself, proposing to restore it into a independent film center that would be redeveloped with a companion wine bar and cafe.

While financing for any real estate development is difficult in the current economy, said Burkley, the North Side’s collaborating community organizations have established a strong package of public assistance for the project. That includes $4 million in new market tax credits raised by the North Side Community Development Fund, $2 million in state funding, and $1.5 million in tax increment financing.

Burkley said North Side Tomorrow plans to make a final selection of a developer this fall and break ground on construction in summer 2011.

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Stocks rallied Friday, finding momentum at the end of a choppy session ahead of the first wave of quarterly corporate results due out next week.

The Dow Jones industrial average (INDU) added 59 points, or 0.6%. The S&P 500 (SPX) gained 8 points, or 0.7%, and the Nasdaq (COMP) composite rose 21 points, or 1%.

All three major indexes drifted on both sides of unchanged during the session before finally turning higher in the last hour.

Investors returned from the Independence Day holiday this week in the mood to buy shares that had been battered in a two-month selloff. In the four sessions this week, the Dow gained 512 points, or 5.3%. The S&P 500 rose 5.4% and the Nasdaq was up 5%.

It was the best week in nearly a year for the market, with all three major gauges seeing their biggest results since the week ended July 17, 2009. in that week, the three majors all gained between 7% and 7.4%.

"The market has rebounded this week in anticipation of a fairly decent period of corporate earnings," said Tyler Vernon, chief investment officer at Biltmore Capital. "This will be a nice bounce, but long term, I think a lot of the concerns about the global economy are still there."

While there haven’t been many positives on the economic front, there’s been some optimism that companies will still be able to continue to make profits, even with the economic strain.

Analysts currently expect year-over-year growth of 27%, according to the latest figures from Thomson Reuters. Dow components Alcoa (AA, Fortune 500), JPMorgan Chase (JPM, Fortune 500), Bank of America (BAC, Fortune 500), Intel (INTC, Fortune 500) and GE (GE, Fortune 500) are all due next week.

Google: The Internet behemoth renewed its license with the Chinese government to operate its site in that country, following a four-month battle over censorship.

A renewal had been in question due to tension between the company and China over the censorship of search results online payday loans. But Google’s decision last week to no longer automatically redirect users of Google’s China site to its uncensored Hong Kong site seemed to pave the way for the renewal.

Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) shares gained 2.4%.

On the move: Financials were among the big gainers Friday, with JPMorgan Chase (JPM, Fortune 500), Citigroup (C, Fortune 500), US Bancorp (USB, Fortune 500) and Regions Financial (RF, Fortune 500) among the stocks lifting the KBW Bank (BKX) index by 2.4%.

Caterpillar (CAT, Fortune 500), Chevron (CVX, Fortune 500), DuPont (DD, Fortune 500), Merck (MRK, Fortune 500) and Intel (INTC, Fortune 500) were among the Dow’s biggest gainers.

Market breadth was positive and volume was very light. On the New York Stock Exchange, winners beat losers by almost four to one on volume of 880 million shares. On the Nasdaq, advancers beat decliners by three to one on volume of 1.61 billion shares.

Economy: Wholesale Inventories rose 0.5% in May after climbing 0.2% in April. Economists surveyed by Briefing.com expected inventories to rise 0.4%.

World markets: European markets gained, with Britain’s FTSE 100 rising 0.5%, Germany’s DAX advancing 0.5% and France’s CAC 40 climbing 0.5%.

Asian markets rallied after South Korea raised its benchmark interest rate, seen as an optimistic sign for the economy. Japan’s Nikkei rose 0.5%, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng gained 1.6% and the Shanghai Composite rose 2.5%.

Commodities: U.S. light crude oil for August delivery rose $1.01 to $76.09 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

COMEX gold for August delivery gained $16.30 to $1,209.80 an ounce.

Bonds: Treasury prices fell, raising the yield on the 10-year note to 3.06% from 3.02% late Thursday. Debt prices and yields move in opposite directions. 

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University and public officials are beginning a study of transportation needs for the University of New Mexico and Central New Mexico Community College.

The Travel Demand Management Study is jointly funded by the two universities, the City of Albuquerque, Bernalillo County and the Mid-Region Council of Governments. It aims to identify ways to increase transportation efficiency, reducing problems such as traffic congestion, parking issues, travel costs and related environmental impacts.

The MRCOG will hold the first public meeting on July 14 to inform people about the study and hear public comment on the issues, said Rio Metro Board Chair Isaac Benton in a news release.

“We must start by identifying the main transportation issues affecting these two institutions,” Benton said. “This meeting will be the first opportunity the public has to discuss what we need to start looking at. At the end of the study we will have recommendations on specific ways we can make travel to and from UNM and CNM more convenient, affordable, and compatible with nearby neighborhoods low rates payday advance.”

The study’s first phase will focus on a detailed evaluation of existing travel markets and projections for year 2015. That information will be used to identify potential solutions, which will then be analyzed in more detail in the study’s second phase, said MRCOG Interim Executive Director Dewey Cave.

“This initial public meeting focuses on the types of information and analysis that will be conducted as part of the first phase,” Cave said. “It also looks at how this effort will provide all stakeholders with a better understanding of the major factors influencing travel to and from this area.”

The meeting runs from 12 p.m. to 1 p.m., and again from 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., at the UNM Student Union Building in Lobo Room A.

For more information, call the MRCOG at (505) 247-1750, or visit www.mrcog-nm.gov.

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Color & Supply Co. Inc. and subsidiary Kentucky Paint Manufacturing Co. have been sold to Farrell-Calhoun Paint, a Memphis, Tenn.-based coatings manufacturer and distributor.

Farrell-Calhoun’s acquisition includes a manufacturing facility, three Kentucky Paint retail stores in Lexington and Frankfort, Ky., and seven product lines, including FenceGuard, Double Duty, Acrylex and Dura Lex.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Farrell-Calhoun operates 30 company-owned stores in five states and distributes through dealers in a total of 13 states.

The company was founded in 1905 and manufactures industrial maintenance and architectural coatings, including its own product, Green Leaf maximum performance coatings.

The purchase gives Farrell-Calhoun a base for distribution in central Kentucky and a popular line of fence paint used in the horse farm industry, the company said in a news release.

Color & Supply was founded in 1929. Its Kentucky Paint stores will be rebranded as Farrell-Calhoun/Town & Ranch stores and will carry both Farrell-Calhoun and Town & Ranch products, the release said.

Randy McMillen, dealer operations manager for Farrell-Calhoun, will relocate to Lexington to become area district manager.

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Booyah Inc. said on Monday that it has raised a $20 million round of funding led by Accel Partners.

The Palo Alto-based company has a popular app for Apple Inc.'s iPhone called MyTown, a game in which users "check in" at physical locations to move ahead. It has an estimated 2 million users and is reportedly growing at a rate of 100,000 users a week.

Cofounder and CEO Keith Lee said the company plans to use the money to expand its work force and invest in to-be-announced new projects.

In addition to Palo Alto-based Accel, existing investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers of Menlo Park and DAG Ventures of Palo Alto also participated in the round.

Accel partner Jim Breyer is joining Booyah's board. "Booyah is at the epicenter of the fastest growing markets today— mobile, social, and interactive gaming," he said.

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Healthcare Trust of America Inc., a Scottsdale-based real estate investment trust, has purchased the Federal North medical office building in Pittsburgh for about $40.5 million.

Federal North is a four-level medical office building comprising nearly 192,000 square feet. Included in the deal is a separate four-level, 525-space parking garage. The Class A building, located near a 724-bed hospital, is 99 percent occupied.

“This acquisition is consistent with our long-term strategy of acquiring high-quality medical office buildings in key markets which are affiliated with strong health care systems,” Mark Engstrom, HTA’s executive vice president of acquisitions, said in a prepared statement bad credit pay day loans.

Engstrom added that Federal North is the REIT’s 10th acquisition in 2010.

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SPANISH LAKE — Construction under way on a $112 million building to replace the National Personnel Records Center in Overland ensures the retention of 800 jobs for the area, St. Louis County Executive Charlie Dooley said Wednesday.

Federal officials and developers updated Dooley on the project, at 1829 Dunn Road, where work began in November. When completed in 2011, the three-story building will hold the records of 57 million people who served in the American military from the late 1890s until a decade ago, when the service branches moved to electronic records.

It will replace the mammoth records center at 9700 Page Avenue, which became vulnerable when the Pentagon announced its realignment of military installations in 2005. That building was built in 1956.

"This was not supposed to stay in St. Louis," Dooley said. "This is a win-win, not only for the county, but for the whole metropolitan area."

The new site is just east of Hazelwood East Middle School and north of Interstate 270. It also will house records of former civilian employees, now kept at 111 Winnebago Street in St. Louis.

The Molasky Group, a Las Vegas developer, will own the 547,000-square-foot building and lease it to the federal General Services Administration for about $9.2 million annually, or $185 million over 20 years.

Mary Ruwwe, a regional official for the federal agency, defended the lease as the only way to get the project done. She said the government usually wanted to build and own a project of this sort.

"We are doing it this way because it’s a funding mechanism that works," Ruwwe said no fax cash advances. "We knew we couldn’t get funding to renew the old building, and this (construction) project might not get congressional appropriation for years."

Chuck Moody, Molasky’s senior vice president, said the lease payments would cover upkeep and maintenance, which he estimated at about $2.8 million annually.

Ruwwe said the government needed a better environment for preserving the records. The government gets 1.5 million requests each year for copies of military records from service personnel, their families, historians and the simply curious.

The project, a joint venture of Tarlton Corp. of St. Louis and Hardin Construction Co. of Atlanta, will employ as many as 800 construction workers, officials said. As of Wednesday, workers were digging for the foundation and grading parts of the 29-acre site.

The National Archives Records Administration, which maintains the military records, is to begin moving in April 2011 and be fully operational in November 2011. Bryan McGraw, an archives official, said the new building would use less than half the floor space of the current one for storage because of higher stacks and better retrieval systems.

Ruwwe said the government would probably demolish the records-storage building on Page and keep the office addition for other agencies. A fire in 1973 damaged or destroyed about 16 million records, including those for many Army veterans of World War II.

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Mesa officials insist a Cactus League ticket tax to help pay for a new Chicago Cubs ballpark is still alive at the Arizona Legislature.

An official familiar with the Cubs stadium financing plan said Major League Baseball and Commissioner Bud Selig are trying to trying to put the brakes on the bill at the Legislature. The official, who asked not to be identified, said MLB wants Mesa, the Cubs and other teams to look at funding options beyond a tax on all Arizona spring training games. Other Cactus League teams, including the Arizona Diamondbacks, object to a ticket tax being used for the Cubs stadium.

MLB has been talking to Arizona lawmakers and others about setting up special tax districts to help finance stadiums. MLB officials did not respond to requests for comment. But the unnamed official said the league was asking the Cubs and Mesa to extend their timetables for a new stadium, and for various sides to take the summer and fall to find a new plan for the 2011 session.

The Cubs want a new a stadium by 2013 and have threatened to move to Florida without one. MLB also is telling the Cubs to back down from that threat, according to the official.

The bill with the Cubs ticket tax has been stripped down and passed by the Arizona House of Representatives without a $1 car rental fee in Maricopa County. And, while the ticket charge is part of the approved measure, it did not include a specific amount for the charge. Previous plans included an 8 percent charge on all Cactus League tickets to help pay for an $84 million new stadium for the Cubs.

Mesa government relations director Scott Butler said the ticket plan and the bill are not dead, and the city is trying to work out a plan that can pass this legislative session.

"The version of (House Bill) 2736 that passed out of the House yesterday was intentionally stripped down as a show of good faith to all of the stakeholders. By and large, most members of the Legislature want to see the Cubs remain in Mesa and provide an ongoing revenue source for other Cactus League facilities. The only question has been what is the appropriate mixture of revenue sources to make this happen," Butler said.

"I’m still 110% confident that we could push a surcharge-only bill through the Senate and to the governor, but we don’t want to fight the 14 other teams and MLB at each step of the process no teletrack payday loans. The Senate will give all parties the opportunity to renew discussions and find a revenue mixture that most can support. The alternative is that the Cubs leave Arizona and the $130-plus-million annual economic impact is relocated to Naples (Fla.)," Butler said.

House Speaker Kirk Adams, R-Mesa, and Majority Leader John McComish, R-Ahwatukee, are the main proponents of the ticket tax, along with Mesa Mayor Scott Smith. They argue that the ticket tax revenue will go to other projects besides the Cubs stadium and that before the House vote, the bill included language to use some of the money to help Pima County with stadium debt.

Thus far, the trio has opposed other funding ideas including some proposed by lobbyist John Kaites, who represents the Chicago White Sox. Kaites has talked about taxes on restaurants, satellite television communications as well as special tax districts. Butler and Mesa lobbyist John MacDonald contend those ideas either won’t raise enough revenue or lack political support.

MLB has talked about special property tax districts around the proposed stadium to capture revenue for various teams, not just the Cubs.

Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon supports similar sales tax districts that could be used in downtown Phoenix. Arizona Rep. Jerry Weiers, R-Glendale, proposed a special tax district bill that could have been used to help the Phoenix Coyotes at Jobing.com Arena, as well as US Airways Center in downtown Phoenix, but that bill has gone nowhere.

The D-backs back a countywide public vote on a sales tax increase to pay for the Cubs ballpark. Mesa officials point out a similar vote was not held to get a sales tax increase to pay for Chase Field in Phoenix.

McComish previously said he was open to other ideas, but he has not supported other options. The lawmaker did not respond to a request for comment.

The Cubs’ financing battle comes in the wake of funding shortfalls for the Arizona Sports and Tourism Authority, which previously funded Cactus League stadiums via hotel and car rental taxes. But the recession has hurt tourism and resulted in a $10 million shortfall for AZSTA, forcing alternative plans for the Cubs.

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The Federal Reserve raised the rate it charges banks that borrow from the central bank when they run short of funds.

The Fed said late Thursday it is raising its discount rate by a quarter percentage point, or 25 basis points, to 0.75%. The central bank said in a statement it made the move in response to improving financial market conditions.

The move is largely symbolic, because banks do little borrowing at the discount window.

The unanimous decision to boost the discount rate also has no effect on the more widely watched federal funds rate, which measures the rate banks charge each other for overnight loans. That rate is expected to remain between 0% and 0.25% for the foreseeable future, given the slack in the labor market and the still fragile state of the economy.

But raising the discount rate allows Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke to take another small step toward normal monetary policy, after the past two-plus years were consumed in a financial firefight.

"The modifications are not expected to lead to tighter financial conditions for households and businesses and do not signal any change in the outlook for the economy or for monetary policy," the Fed said in a statement.

The Fed also shortened the term of some discount window loans and raised the minimum bid in the term auction facilities it uses to supply overnight funds to banks. Those facilities were among the many innovations Bernanke introduced since the onset of the credit crunch in mid-2007 to supply U.S. banks with funding.

As the recession deepened, the Fed moved to support the housing market by buying more than $1 trillion of mortgage-related securities. When buying those securities, the Fed credited the selling banks with reserves at the Fed. This huge sum of so-called excess reserves has led to worries that any upturn in the economy will be met with an inflationary lending spike from banks.

Bernanke has emphasized that the Fed will use multiple new tools to prevent the excess reserves from fueling inflation, including the payment of interest on reserves at the Fed and the sale of Fed assets.

But as eager as policymakers are to show that policy is on a track toward normalization — that is, a nonzero fed funds rate and a smaller Fed balance sheet — the process is clearly going to take time.

The Fed suggested as much Thursday, in explaining why it may be a while before the spread between the federal funds rate and the discount rate may return to its pre-crisis level of 1 percentage point. Following Thursday’s increase, the spread is now half a percentage point.

The central bank said Thursday’s increase should "encourage depository institutions to rely on private funding markets for short-term credit and to use the Federal Reserve’s primary credit facility only as a backup source of funds" and added that it will "assess over time whether further increases in the spread are appropriate." 

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