With data center real estate market behaving differently than other commercial real estate in the US, advisory firm Grubb & Ellis is expecting another large build-to-suit data center development to be announced during the current quarter, following last month’s announcement of construction of a new Facebook data center in Oregon.

While there was very little investment activity in the office real estate market in 2009, the comparatively small data center market saw 12 data center properties sold during the year for a total of about $1 billion, Grubb & Ellis said in its latest report on US data center real estate.

Several major enterprises are currently in the process of finalizing first-quarter transactions, the analysts said, and one of them may very well be a data center development deal.

Grubb & Ellis made the prediction in its February report on the US data center real estate market, which focused largely on the New York Tri-State region, specifically, a geographical area often referred to as “the doughnut.”

On March 3, DatacenterDynamics will host a conference in New York City, where Grubb & Ellis will join one of its biggest competitors CB Richard Ellis, as well as investment firm DH Capital, in a panel discussion of trends and characteristics of today’s New York Tri-State data center market.

Demand in the New York market, as has traditionally been the case, is driven by companies that make up the financial vertical. Such firms want to locate their data centers as close to Wall Street as possible to reduce latency, which has become key factor to gaining competitive advantage in the financial industry.

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The doughnut is formed by companies not willing to locate their data centers closer to Manhattan than a 15 mile radius but not further than a 62 mile radius, “due to the need for synchronous data transfer,” Grubb & Ellis says. The resulting pastry-like ring covers parts of the states of New Jersey, New York and Connecticut.

The area continues to have some of the highest power rates in the country, however, ranging between $0.15 and $0.19 per kWh.

Of the three states, New Jersey remains the most desirable, with lots of available real estate and power.

Among companies that have chosen to locate data centers in New Jersey are NYSE Euronext, whose 400,000 square foot Mahwah facility is due to come online later this year, Credit Suisse, expected to start construction of a 284,000 square foot facility in Clifton in the near future, and Morgan Stanley, whose 330,000 square foot data center in Franklin Township is in the final stages of construction.

Northern part of the state currently has four greenfield sites suitable for data center development, each site able to accommodate up to 100,000 square feet and up to 80 MW of power.

Last week, DuPont Fabros, a large US real estate investment trust, announced that it had resumed construction of its greenfield site in Piscataway, N.J.

The report’s authors were Michael Mandel, Alan Lurie and Jim Kerrigan of Grubb & Ellis’s National Data Center Practice.