If Roe V. Wade Is Overturned, Abortion Laws Will Be A Site-Selection Weapon, CRE Experts Say

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A magnitudinous confluence of the corporate return-to-work push, supply chain issues that appear to be worsening, rising interest rates and the realization that office space needs to be recently built or updated to be competitive is fueling a historic surge in renovations.

In recent months, for the first time ever, architectural firms are making more income from renovation work than new construction, said American Institute of Architects Chief Economist Kermit Baker, who expects the run on retrofitting to be more than a late pandemic blip. 

It is being driven in part by an “onslaught” of building renovations happening right now, according to CBRE Global Head of Occupier Thought Leadership Julie Whelan. Landlords, in a moment of record-high vacancy and looking to differentiate their properties for future tenants, are spending vast sums on major upgrades.

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On this episode of Bisnow Reports, we sit down in SoHo with Amish Tolia, the co-founder of Leap. The 4-year-old company leases retail stores on long-term deals with landlords and then subleases them to retailers on flexible terms.

Many of Leap’s brands are online outfits that haven't had a physical location before, and the firm amalgamates shopping patterns, like e-commerce sales, foot traffic and local demographics, and uses that data to inform which brands go where.

On the podcast, Tolia discusses why physical locations are of increasing importance to retailers, working with the real estate community and changes Apple has made that rendered a company like Leap even more necessary.

“Last year, Apple came out with a pretty big update to their tracking, so now if you go on your iPhone, you open any application, you'll probably notice that they'll ask you upfront, ‘Do you want to share your location data?’" Tolia said. "… That's obviously impacted a lot of the ad targeting capabilities for Facebook, because Facebook was reliant on that data for a long time. So what that has really done is that [now], people are really running back into [brick-and-mortar] retail pretty darn quick.”

Read the full story here.