What I'm Reading Green Machine: As if brick and mortar retail landlords and businesses don't already have enough cause for concern, a new study by the MIT Real Estate Innovation Lab found a tangible environmental benefit to online shopping. In particular, the study concluded that carbon emissions from online shopping...
February 12th – Green Machine
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 8th – Dead End?
What I'm Reading Dead End? Distressed debt hedge funds raised billions to take advantage of COVID opportunities. However, the capital markets have largely recovered and junk yields have plunged, leaving them with few opportunities to deploy their dry powder. This is totally reminiscent of the Great Recession when capital raised...
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 3rd – Normalized
What I'm Reading Normalized: Before the pandemic, the barriers to widespread remote work were as much mental as they were technological. Now those barriers have broken down completely and the implications are huge for both regional population flows and the future of the office market. The Atlantic Back to Normal:...
February 2nd – Deteriorating
What I'm Reading Deteriorating: Moody's Analytics REIS is out with a somewhat devastating report for the office sector, predicting that vacancies will likely show their largest increase this year. The report predicts that the occupancy continue to deteriorate until at least 2023 with employers still pushing off physical space decisions...
February 1st – Prophecy
What I'm Reading Prophecy: Starting back in the summer of 2020, whenever people ask me what I think will end the market mania, my (somewhat tongue in cheek) answer has been that the market top will occur once WeWork is taken public via a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) merger. ...