Flooding Is Turning Elevators Into Lethal Traps With Little Oversight
As Hurricane Harvey bore down on Texas in 2017, Jill Renick spent her last moments alive at the Omni Houston Hotel, where she worked as the spa director.
At 5:40 a.m. Central time on Aug. 27, 2017, Renick called the front desk, telling colleagues she was stuck in the elevator in the basement, with water rushing in. A surveillance video showed she freed herself from the elevator, but by that point waters in the basement were waist deep. Shortly after, the power went out. Flood waters continued to rise. Her body was found 11 days later in the ceiling tiles.
Renick's family is suing the Omni, which didn't have a flood sensor — required by the city — that may have prevented the elevator from descending into water.
Elevator guidelines that require features like flood sensors aren't always mandated or enforced.…
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PCCP Buys S.F. Showplace Square Office Building For $120M
PCCP has acquired a four-story, 138K SF Class-A office building in San Francisco for $120M.
The multi-tenant property at 350 Rhode Island St. is 100% occupied. It has 35K SF floor plates and was built in 2001 as one of…
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Amid Notes Of Caution, Investors Look Favorably On U.S. CRE
The latest monthly jobs report shows the U.S. economy continues to purr, and even though some investors now sound notes of caution, most remain optimistic about the nation's real estate market for 2019.
“The only place you can be assured of business doing pretty well overall is in the U.S.,” TVO Capital Management CEO and Chairman Wayne Vandenburg said.
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Online Grocery Sales Will Rise Rapidly In The 2020s If Grocers Make Shopping Easier For Consumers
Currently only 3% of U.S. grocery purchases are made online, but a new study by Bain & Co. and Google predicts that e-commerce penetration in the grocery sector could at least triple in the next decade.
Such an increase won't come without effort on the part of major grocery chains, because American consumer habits are hard to change when it comes to food.
Bain and Google found that while 25% of consumers surveyed used an online…
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The World's 3rd-Largest Sovereign Wealth Fund Makes Huge Plans In Small Town
LONDON — When the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority bought two slightly tired shopping centers in Slough, U.K., for £130M in 2016, it was a bit of a head-scratcher.
First, shopping centers. Even in 2016, before things got really bad in retail, global investors like ADIA were selling rather than buying shopping centers.
And Slough? In the past few years ADIA has been buying and building in Paris, New York and other global gateway cities. Slough, a town of 161,000 people about half an hour west of London — a town known as the unsexy setting of the U.K. version of "The Office" — felt a little off-pitch.
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