Boston's Suburban Developers Enjoying A Paradigm Shift In Demand For Office, Housing

The sale-leaseback transaction, nearly dormant in 2020, is coming back in vogue as investors search the pandemic-riddled landscape for yield while cash-strapped tenants hunt for capital infusions. 

Often parties with these two convergent interests find a solution in sale-leaseback transactions, or deals where businesses sell off properties to commercial real estate investors and then lease the same spaces back as tenants.

"I would say the current backdrop is incredibly conducive for sale-leasebacks right now," SLB Capital Advisors Managing Partner Scott Merkle said. "I would go as far as to say the market is really on fire."

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When WeWork CEO Sandeep Mathrani ventured on a podcast recently that “the least engaged [employees] are very comfortable working from home," the backlash from social and mainstream media was so swift and vitriolic that he soon issued a clarification on LinkedIn, apologising and clarifying that he had not meant to denigrate people who choose to work from home. 

But while he sought to explain himself more clearly, he didn’t walk back from what he said, because he felt he had a weapon on his side: evidence and data. Mathrani had been citing a study commissioned by WeWork of 2,000 employees and C-suite execs into how workers feel about different types of work environments. 

As government guidance changes and working from home becomes less mandatory in countries like the U.S. and UK, the debate about the best way for companies to manage their workforces and the balance between working from homes and offices is heating up. 

And those like Mathrani with skin in the game are increasingly commissioning or citing studies into where employees want to work in future, where their employers want them to work, and how productive they are in these various locations. Whether undertaken by academics, market research firms, tech companies or employers themselves, these studies are legion, and they will play a big role in determining how one of the huge societal shifts that will come out of the coronavirus pandemic, how and where we work, will play out over the coming months and years.

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Multifamily developers are still figuring out how to adjust plans to account for record prices for construction materials, especially lumber. Though lumber prices have dropped from their record of $1,686 per thousand board feet on May 7 to $1,306 on May 19, the lower price…

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Real estate is traditionally considered one of the most illiquid asset classes, available only to high net worth individuals and companies, but the invention of blockchain technology has begun to open the sector up to smaller-scale investors.

Tokenization, where properties are divided up into digital shares, offers a chance for individuals to invest in institutional-quality real estate assets. It's a relatively new way of buying and selling property — and one that is poised to take off in a big way, according to RedSwan CEO Ed Nwokedi.

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