Editors’ Weekly News Roundup November 4 – November 8
Marquee names filled the headlines of the five most read Connect CRE stories this past week. Leading the ranking was a story about deal talks that bore fruit later in the week.
It’s always news when Blackstone makes or prepares to make a real estate play. Toward the start of the past week, we picked up a story originally reported by Reuters that said the asset management giant was negotiating the acquisition of Retail Opportunity Investment Corp.
The story as reported by Connect CRE, Blackstone in Talks to Acquire Shopping Center Owner ROIC, was our most read for the week. A couple of days later, both Connect Money and Connect CRE carried the news of Blackstone’s official announcement that it would take the West Coast-focused retail REIT private for $4 billion. It’s the latest in a lengthy series of Blackstone privatizations of publicly traded commercial real estate owners and operators.
Another household name—literally in this case, since so many households worldwide are customers—is Amazon. Connect CRE has posted hundreds of stories over the years that focused on Amazon’s warehouse use, but the past week’s second most read story concerned its office occupancy.
Amazon Moving Out of Seattle Office Tower Near HQ reported that the company is continuing its shift from its hometown to suburban Bellevue, WA. While other Seattle-area companies are still addressing their remote/onsite ratios for office-using employees, Amazon recently set a Jan. 2, 2025 deadline for corporate staff to be back in the office Monday through Friday.
One of the enduring images in national coverage of the back-to-back Hurricanes Helene and Milton earlier this fall was the roof blowing off Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, FL during Milton. The city owns the stadium, home of Major League Baseball’s Tampa Bay Rays, and will now focus on salvaging what it can of the ballpark.
Our story on these efforts, Repair Work on Tropicana Field’s Roof Underway, was the third most read on Connect CRE last week. The MLB franchise plans to occupy a new stadium on the same site by the 2028 baseball season, but in the meantime, repairs will be needed to prevent further damage.
On the subject of homes, one of the best-known and most prolific builders in both single-family and apartments figured in both the headline and the body copy of the week’s fourth most read story. A Colliers team arranged the sale of a land site in Poway, a San Diego suburb, to Lennar Homes.
Poway Development Site Sells to Lennar provided details of the transaction for the fully entitled parcel, known as Harmon Ranch. The sellers were the Successor Trustees of the Harmon Family Trust Agreement.
Completing the top five was a story on what would be the second largest property tax increase in Chicago history. Although Mayor Brandon Johnson campaigned on a promise not to raise taxes, we reported in Chicago Mayor Calls for $300M Property Tax Hike to Close Budget Gapthat he believes mismanagement by his predecessors has made it necessary to do so. The increase would only partly address a shortfall of nearly $1 billion in fiscal 2025.