What I'm Reading Flight to Paradise: With the northern hemisphere in the middle of winter and many regions still under pandemic lockdowns, wealthy buyers are more motivated than ever to purchase homes on warm-weather islands, sometimes sight unseen. I'm seeing this play out in real time on the big island...
February 15th – Straw Man
February 11th – Blunt Challenge
What I'm Reading Blunt Challenge: The number of marijuana stores in the U.S. is poised to grow in 2021 and 2022 as more states legalize the narcotic, the federal government toys with legalization at the national level, and already large sales chains seek to get larger. This despite often complex...
February 10th – The Great Migration
What I'm Reading The Great Migration: A new report from JBREC suggests that An estimated 400,000 households will move specifically due to their work at home challenges. This segment will be dominated by young families, who report frustration with the limitations (noise, space, privacy) of their current setup for remote...
February 9th – Hybrid Model
What I'm Reading Hybrid: Retail stores are increasingly adopting a hybrid model, whereby they accommodate both in-store shoppers and the fulfillment of e-commerce orders, creating a new asset class that sits somewhere between retail and distribution. This is likely to lead to major changes in the next few year. For...
February 5th – Out of the Bottle
What I'm Reading Out of the Bottle: The CRE industry has been notoriously slow to embrace technology. However, COVID has led to a substantial acceleration in the adoption of technology as a means to adapting. Now that the genie is out of the bottle, things are unlikely to go back...
February 4th – Signs of Life
One Big Thing Today I'm going to focus a major investment sale broker pet peeve: yield fluffing (and yes, I made up that term). For the uninitiated, a fluffer is someone who gets a male porn actor ready to "perform" before the cameras start rolling. I'm not going to explain...
January 28th – Storm Clouds
What I'm Reading Storm Clouds: The apartment sector has been a bright spot during COVID-19 but that is starting to change. Enhanced eviction protection, lower rent collections and unprecedented declines in asking rent in some urban markets are taking their toll on apartment owners. During the pandemic, the share of...
January 25th – Rocket Fuel
What I'm Reading Rocket Fuel: Morgan Housel's latest piece about how COVID has substantially accelerated wealth and income inequality is an outstanding read and makes a strong case for an economic boom in the coming years - at least for some. This section on mortgage refinancings and the accompanying chart...
January 22nd – Deluge
What I'm Reading Deluge: Office occupancy losses hit record lows in 2020, totaling 84MM square feet with more than half of the losses occurring in CBDs. Expensive markets with a high concentration of tech-and energy-companies were the most impacted. The only relative bright spots were secondary and tertiary markets, which...