Last week, John Reeder, a Senior Advisor at Sperry Van Ness, launched a new blog, Marketwi.se. It includes insights from Reeder as well as Chris Rodriguez, founder and president of Pacific Commercial Investments Inc.
Both have been blogging for a while and are worth reading for their insights alone. But in addition to their frequent commentaries, Reeder has developed a couple of other really nifty features at the blog. One is a Superfeed that aggregates RSS feeds from a ton of different commercial real estate news sources (including, of course, Retail Traffic). That in itself is a great tool. But there's also a CRE Twitter aggregator. What makes that piece so useful is that it isn't just a a relentless stream of whatever CRE folks are tweeting. Instead, it highlights items that multiple people within the industry are tweeting about. In other words, it shines a light on stories or blogs or sites that are generating the most buzz among the commercial real estate Twitterverse.
At any rate, don't take my word for it, go over to Marketwi.se and check out these features for yourself.
Here are some other recent news and notes from the retail real estate world.
- Now that Simon Property Group has amended its offer for General Growth, the Chicago-based REIT has gone back to Brookfield Asset Management to see if the Canadian real estate giant will change its offer by upping its price and seeking fewer warrants.
- Healthy retailers looking for premium space are having a hard time finding it, even with the high vacancy rates at shopping centers and regional malls. The situation is such that Richard Baker, chief executive officer of NRDC Equity Partners LLC, which owns Lord & Taylor, described his firm's plight as “We wait for other retailers to die and hope that we can take their space.”
- One firm that's not having trouble finding space, however, is Best Buy. The firm is planning to open 1,000 mobile stores in the coming years. It currently operates 77 such stores in the U.S. and wants to open 75 to 100 locations this year alone.
- On the research front, our sister publication NREI reported that investment research firm Morningstar announced that it has agreed to acquire Realpoint LLC, headquartered in Horsham, Pa., which specializes in structured finance data.