Newton Gets First Taste Of Boston's Juicy Lab Market. Will It Want More?

The American arm of a German investment firm is entering Boston’s office market with the purchase of a Financial District building. KanAm Grund America bought the 52K SF, 10-story 147 Milk St. for $47.9M from BentallGreenOak last week, according to Suffolk County public records. The building…

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With the ever-increasing speed of the coronavirus vaccine rollout, economic impact payments making their way into millions of bank accounts and the warming weather, the travel industry’s comeback may have already started.

March has brought with it a bump in hotel occupancy rates, led by Florida and other vacation destinations that have seen spring break traffic, industry data firm STR reports. The national average occupancy rate was 58.9% in the week ending March 20, nearly 7% higher than the previous week and 85% of the rate during the comparable week in 2019.

The increased activity in hotels over the past month represents hope for a rush in travel in the summer months to come. But such numbers shouldn’t be taken as overall indicators of the market’s health since they coincided with the traditional spring break rush, multiple hotel operators and industry experts told Bisnow. 

The pickup in tourism may be too little, too late, and the industry may be on the verge of a much-anticipated wave of distressed asset sales.

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Tuesday marks the one-year anniversary of the JFK8 walkout, when hundreds of Amazon workers walked out of the company’s 855K SF Staten Island distribution facility — named after a president who signed a landmark collective bargaining executive order — to protest the working conditions there after seven of their colleagues contracted Covid-19 during the worst of the coronavirus pandemic’s assault on New York City. 

The workers claimed the company wasn’t being transparent about the number of cases inside the warehouse and that it didn’t take proper safety precautions. They demanded 100% paid sick leave and a plan on how the company would address the virus moving forward. The walkout set off an unprecedented labor movement at Amazon warehouses around the country, one whose reckoning is coming to a head this week.

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AI will change the way we use offices, and it will be the tool to help CRE understand those changes too. The shape of the post-pandemic office, adjusting to the contours of a more remote workforce and reopening pressures, is still in flux. For many in commercial real estate who embrace the potential of AI and automation to change the industry, these new technologies will help make sense out of some of the chaos. 

“What we’ve seen over the last year is the office is being redefined, and employers are stepping back and trying to understand the purpose of physical space,” Cushman & Wakefield Global Innovation Hub Head Kathleen Cahill said. "The commonality is that physical space needs to drive more value to employers and occupiers, and technology is the main way to do that. There’s no magic formula.” 

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