The landlord did not disclose the asking rent, but the average asking rent in Midtown South was about $79.90 per square foot, according to a Transwestern report on the second quarter of 2023.

Brendan O’Leary and Steven Langton of Cushman & Wakefield (CWK) negotiated on behalf of duotone audio group while Robert Silver, Brittany Silver, Anthony Sciacca and Jamie Jacobs of Newmark (NMRK) represented the landlord alongside in-house representation from Jeffrey Gural and Rhonda Singer.

C&W, Newmark and GFP did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Located in Hudson Square at the corner of Varick and Houston streets, the 12-story building was constructed in 1927 with a design by architect Frank Parker. In 2022, GFP renovated the 490,000-square-foot structure with a new lobby, entrance and mechanical systems.

Other tenants include health care tech startup COTA, which signed for 9,764 square feet in March, and video content platform Momenti, which grabbed 4,949 square feet in February, Commercial Observer previously reported.

Mark Hallum can be reached at mhallum@commercialobserver.com.

Chase Garbarino, co-founder and CEO of HqO, has many ideas and strong opinions as to what both sides are doing — and still need to do — to bring some stability to the office market.

In late August, Garbarino spoke with PropTech Insider about his overall view of the return to office and the myriad factors that are driving owners and occupiers to “group therapy” sessions with HqO.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

PropTech Insider: Let’s start with the big picture: What is the intersection of proptech and human resources?

Chase Garbarino: Everybody in the working world is pretty aware of the tension between HR management and employees in companies. In the return to office today, the C-suite and executives are trying to thread the needle more and more. You saw it with Zoom the other day, with Meta and Facebook — they just cracked down even harder on their return to office policies. 

Obviously, this is not your traditional global heads of real estate facilities, folks. This tends to cross the line into HR. In the eyes of employees, work from home has become the ultimate benefit. So, if you’re taking away an employee benefit that they’ve particularly become accustomed to over the last couple of years, this becomes a very heightened issue around what employers are trying to do for the employee experience and how they need to think about this as an employee benefit.

A lot of folks are turning to the real estate side of the house, to proptech as an answer for this.  The answer used to be you go to an office because it’s the way we do business and nobody questioned it. Now I think HR leaders are picking their heads up saying, “We have a significantly more disgruntled employee base, my compensation is tied to retention, but we also need to bring them back, so how can I work with the real estate and facilities teams and what kind of solutions do we have to make it so that people aren’t too upset about coming back?” 

This is the No. 1 issue for so many companies with regards to their human capital. And I think proptech can step in and be part of the solution in finding the right balance for companies on how to handle this.

Do you see more companies insisting that workers return to the office, even if it’s at least three or four days a week right now?

Yeah, overwhelmingly, you’re seeing significantly more. This was always our point of view, which I don’t think was rocket science to predict, but it has come true. Nobody wanted to go first.

Jamie Dimon [CEO at JPMorgan Chase] and some of those people can pull it off. Companies did not want to come off as the insensitive employer that’s bringing people back. So once [Mark] Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Dimon — very well-known celebrity executives — started to bring people back there was a bit of a groundswell. I think you’re seeing significantly more companies do it. 

You will find a number of companies saying, “We’re going to lean in very hard to complete flexibility,” but I think most of those companies had that point of view pre-pandemic. A very big tech company like Atlassian, which had that policy beforehand, is now running a lot of PR around that, but it was always going to be a bit of a herd mentality. I think one of the funniest things is when companies try to not use the M-word, — quote unquote, mandate. If you’re going to do it, at least be honest about it.

So working from home remains firmly in the mix?

One of the consistent things you see in the announcements about companies wanting a return to the office is that they’re very rarely calling out what days of the week. There’s some flexibility on when during the week. I think most employers, particularly the HR departments, are saying, “If you’re a parent with young kids or just anybody that has a doctor’s appointment, whatever it is, life happens. We want to give our people some flexibility on when they come in.”

The whole point of coming back is to be around other people. If the people you need to be around are on different days, that’s going to be challenging. Naturally, you can take Friday off the board because most people are working from home on Friday, but there’s still more decision-making and coordination that’s been pushed down on people. We’re also seeing that there is a sense of employees to some degree saying, “Look, we just really want it clear — because we know you want us back — but if you don’t make clear what the expectations are, it’s very hard for us to comply.”

HqO reaches more than 700 of the Fortune 2,000 companies through our platform. A lot of them would like to provide a lot more flexibility on location. There aren’t a ton of people outside of big offices, where you’ve put a lot of investment into making them special and purpose-built for your employee base. What I continue to hear from large employers and even smaller employers is they really care about their people being together. It’s not necessarily like we need them in Midtown West or Wall Street, but we want them together. Are there more flexible options for them to tap into — like all this talk about the hub-and-spoke model, where you provide access to spaces in certain downtown areas and farther out in metro areas? 

I think a lot of employers would embrace those solutions, but the industry has to put in some work to be able to provide greater optionality on how their customers can access great spaces.

Photo: Kayana Szymczak

It sounds like the burden to some extent is on the employees to make this all work. But, on the management side, are they putting all the pressure on HR to make the return to work flexibility happen?

It’s going both ways. One of the things that I see that I think is very well intended but potentially a mistake is that they’re trying to give autonomy to frontline managers for their team. My first inclination is to give managers freedom to do that, but what happens is that tension tends to build up over time when you have one manager who has a different policy than another. That can create internal conflict with the people on those teams. By pushing down the decision-making to the individual managers, it can create problems within different pockets of the company. 

If you have a broad blanket mandate, it makes it easier, taking a certain amount of decision-making and brain damage off the table. You don’t necessarily have to spend your time as a frontline manager explaining your decision. But it does feel like you’re taking a certain autonomy away from them. It’s pretty complicated.

I think managers can be put into a very difficult position if they’re coming up with policies that traditionally would have been decided by the executives and HR. It’s putting a lot of pressure on managers where they might not necessarily be positioned to succeed.

And, by managers, you’re including HR managers?

No, basically everybody but HR. I think HR and executives need to come up with much clearer policies. Not everybody’s going to like the policy, but everybody would opt for clarity over ambiguity any day of the week. If there’s penalties or you’re bonusing people or treating them differently than those who come in or don’t come in, then it needs to be a formalized policy. I think taking the medicine, if you will, getting through it, and having a better relationship with employees works rather than people who are trying to have their cake and eat it too — “We want to be liked and we don’t want to tell you these things, but we’re also going to give opportunity to the people that come in.” It feels disingenuous.

Is HR caught in the middle here trying to make this work between the executives and workers?

It’s an incredibly hard position for them. And it’s an incredibly hard position both for the real estate side and HR, where obviously real estate is looking at their big expense on the profit and loss statement and spending all this money on the thing that they manage. 

Meanwhile, HR, oftentimes their compensation is tied to employee retention, satisfaction and engagement. We tend to underestimate how wildly disruptive shutting the world down for a couple of years was, and then trying to reset it. Everybody’s gonna go through some pain in that. It’s incredibly difficult for HR when not only do you have this global pandemic that completely changed how we work, but then marry it with a zero interest rate environment where employees are just making more and more money, with the grass is always greener attitude where they can just jump over there. And HR is told by the executives to retain the talent at all costs. It’s a very, very difficult job right now.

Is there technology available to HR to handle all these pressures and changes?

I think there are a couple of buckets of technology. You have the overall facilities management technology. That is, how do we manage the square footage and locations that we have and the assets within those. Now you have all these people where the question is how often and when they come in. It’s a completely different paradigm for the facilities people and HR. 

And then HR is all about the sentiment of the employees, the productivity of employees as it bridges to their managers, and their retention numbers around talent. All of this stuff on the facilities side has become the thing employees are most concerned about: “I’ve been working at home for a couple of years now, and my whole work setup is personalized exactly the way that I like it, and you’re making me come back for an obscure amount of days.”

So, for management it has become, “How do we operationally manage this and where do all these new things sit in terms of ownership and accountability?” We just did an event with the CRE Leadership Forum where we bring in global heads of real estate. Just to kick off the meeting, we asked, “Who reports to a global head of real estate, or, if you are more senior, who reports to a CFO, and then who reports to HR?” It was completely evenly split. Different companies have different people reporting to finance and HR, which I think is an indication of how these things have changed. When we’re thinking about the future of work, the job of these folks, no one really has a super clean playbook on it.

There seems to be no denying the gravitational pull back to the office. Are companies still behind the curve in using technological tools to help implement that?

I think we’re on the frontier of all of this, which sits between those of us who are in the business of commercial real estate and the occupiers for whom it’s a means to an end in terms of it being a very large line on their profit and loss. 

We’ve never been particularly sophisticated about measuring the impact of the office in a very quantitative way. The really big picture here is that we have the largest asset class on the planet, and it’s never really been quantified that the customer drives the bottom line of their business. I think that’s now going to become highly scrutinized. 

It already is, right? We’re seeing it in the leasing data. The whole opportunity and challenge is going to be the people who embrace that. We see this in our business — the people who embrace it and really want to try to show the value it delivers for tenants and their employees are ultimately going to win and win pretty big because you’re seeing that in the flight to quality already. Those that are just hoping and praying that it goes back to the way it once was — I would short every single one of those groups if I could.

I don’t think this is purely a cyclical shift. I think it’s a secular shift in the sense that interest rates go up and down, and we know how that impacts real estate. The conversation is now around how employees feel about this. You can’t bank on the CEO and the CFO knowing how we’re going to make these things work. The C-suite and HR are much more heavily involved now in terms of thinking about how the office supports their HR initiatives of engaging these people. Anyone in real estate not leaning heavily into the individual metrics of how employees are supported by the office — if I were an investor, I would not be putting my money into that real estate group.

Given all that, has HqO’s role changed now?

Our role does change. We own the largest data set — 1.3 million employees at a lot of very large Fortune 2,000 companies — kind of the standard assessment of how they feel about their workplace. We have the industry standard data model and assessment base of large tech companies concerning what their employees say is important to them about the office and how they’re currently supported in those things. 

Originally, it was an offering for the employers because it was their relationship with the employees. Now we’re providing this service to the real estate operators because the employers are coming to us saying, “Look, our employees have certain needs out of the property and we don’t control those things. We need our real estate partners to take action on these with us. If they don’t, we’re not going to stay with them. We’re going to go to other people that will be our partner in what is an incredibly challenging time of getting our employees back to the office.”

We’re servicing the employers and the real estate operators, which we think is the critical thing moving forward, getting these two to work together much more closely. Real estate groups and operators need to think of themselves significantly more so as service providers, particularly to those HR folks. Because they’re the ones that hold the keys to policy and mandates and all that stuff on how we ultimately repopulate offices.

Facing such a complex scenario, who is asking for your work more these days: owner operators or tenants?

Oh, man, it changes every 24 hours. One day we’ll have an influx of operators coming in saying, “We get this. We need to be more consumer-oriented around the employee.” We put out an invite for these commercial real estate leadership forums for employers and occupiers, and they fill up within 24 hours. It’s basically like group therapy. They get into a room and they just share their issues and talk through how everybody is dealing with this unprecedented scenario where we have employee productivity in the U.S. down five or six quarters in a row for the first time since the Labor Department has tracked it.

And employee engagement with their companies has trended down. I think loneliness and depression is an issue that we see from employees feeling disconnected. We have a whole generation of Gen Z employees who don’t even really understand how the world of work works because they’ve been left alone in their apartments through no fault of their own. 

But that’s a huge opportunity for the people on the real estate side to try to partner. Being customer-oriented almost solves most problems. If you’re able to retain rent, if you’re able to sell to customers, ultimately that’s going to be our way out of this.

Philip Russo can be reached at prusso@commercialobserver.com.

Younger whiskies, he explained, often get put into blends, like Johnnie Walker. Single-malt scotches are far more valuable and account for only about 8 percent of the whisky market. 

The firm’s newly opened Midtown office — a 1,300-square-foot space at 145 West 57th Street — serves as both a casual workspace for employees and a “whisky vault” where Braeburn can host tastings for investors. The design is somewhat Midcentury Modern, but with Scottish touches, including blue and green tartan wallpaper and vintage Scottish art on the walls. The moldings and parts of the walls were painted red, along with the doors to the tasting room/office.

The ceiling — which had once been ugly acoustic tiles — was replaced with gold mesh tiles, and then the borders were painted red. There are plenty of dark leather accent chairs, in keeping with the men’s club/speakeasy vibe, as well as unique wall sconces and a chandelier hung with brass chains. 

The entry and reception area features floor-to-ceiling glass doors with brass handles, and red curtains have been hung on the other side to add a bit of mystery. Written on the doors, in small gold script, is something like the company’s motto: “an investment in your experience.” The space is across the street from Carnegie Hall, and the wallpaper in the reception area is in fact a print that came from Carnegie Hall’s museum, featuring a mustachioed man crying over his last bottle of whisky. 

The reception has a pair of dark leather vintage Ralph Lauren chairs, as well as a green 1960s safe where guests are instructed to deposit their cellphones before a tasting.

“The client really wanted a no-phones vibe,” explained interior designer Samantha Lopez, who designed the space and has her own firm, Green Velvet. “Face to face, eye to eye. How can we make it cool? So Green Velvet’s idea was we can make this vintage safe that feels fun when you’re at the door.” 

On the way into the tasting room is a seating area with a leather couch and a long row of wall-mounted bookshelves, complete with antique collectibles like a vintage toy Porsche and dozens of old books, and on the other side is a curved wooden bar stocked with whiskies. 

In the center of the room is a custom circular wooden table created by British-based furniture producer Regent Antiques, with the help of an Italian designer. The table incorporates wooden mats at each seat that can be pulled out to play a whisky taste-testing game, where investors can guess how old a whisky is or what part of Scotland it’s from, and bet on their guesses using poker chips. 

Rebecca Baird-Remba can be reached at rbairdremba@commercialobserver.com. 

“These stations were once the very core of the transportation network,” said Bryan Clark Green of Richmond, Va., an architect and the preservation officer of the Society of Architectural Historians. “You start to see a lot of them getting dis-used in the ’60s and ’70s. Amtrak starts to bypass a lot of these stations. It kind of accompanies the general downfall of passenger rail traffic. But they were a vital part of many people’s lives.”

Across the nation, there are dozens of rail stations from the late 19th and the early 20th centuries that were once prized commissions for star architects, relics of the pre-car, pre-airline days when rail was king. These depots served as community centers and were designed aesthetically to lift the neighborhoods around them. 

Now some of them, like the former New York, Westchester & Boston Railway station now known as “Bronxlandia,” are being restored to something resembling their former glory. The restorations are for a variety of uses, including office space for creative companies driving so much of the commercial market’s leasing these days, and new residences for a nation chronically short of housing.

Among the projects is the still-in-use Hoboken Terminal in New Jersey, a $176 million project known as Hoboken Connect that would restore the first and second floors of the ferry terminal, build 389 residential units above, and include a 20-story, 704,000-square-foot office building (the building is the project’s first phase). LCOR, the development firm highly active in the Northeast corridor, is doing the project. It and Cushman & Wakefield, the brokerage repping the office space, did not return requests for comment, and it’s unclear if there are any tenants lined up yet for the site.

The entire New York, Westchester & Boston Railway shut down in 1937.

“Gilbert was fairly active in railroad designs early in his career,” said Marjorie Pearson, president of the St. Paul, Minn.-based Cass Gilbert Society. “A number of those early stations still survive, but they’re not railroad stations anymore. They have been converted to other uses.”

Another is the Michigan Central Station in Detroit, where a train last stopped in 1988, an imposing structure of columns and vaulted arches that haunted that struggling city as scrappers and vandals stripped it for parts while it sat abandoned. The Ford Motor Company bought it five years ago and has started rolling out its conversion into an innovation hub.

Saving these buildings “is a tricky thing,” said Green. “It’s difficult taking a building that was conceived of as a civic building, and moving it into a private function. One of the real challenges of train stations is that the circulation is basically set up to move people very efficiently through the front of the building, through the station and out onto the tracks to get on the train, and then reverse the process. It’s a real challenge to reimagine them and reuse them.”New Yorkers know all too well about how grand transit hubs can tear at a city’s sense of itself. Many still mourn the 1963 demolition of the palatial Pennsylvania Station, designed by the firm McKim Mead & White. And it took a stubborn campaign by preservationists, including Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, to save Grand Central Terminal from a similar fate.

Such a preservation campaign is not easy. Majora Carter, a Bronx-based urban revitalization strategist and Hunts Point native who oversees the Bronxlandia project, said it would take some $3.5 million to bring the stations up to snuff 100 percent, including fixing the roof, the HVAC system, the windows, and doing a water and electrical upgrades, among other things.  

The roughly 4,500-square-foot building has already hosted concerts, pro wrestling matches, professional development meetings, TED talks, a flea market, weddings and parties. It will host an event in November to mark the 50th anniversary of hip-hop, with performers including Fab 5 Freddy, Grand Wizzard Theodore and others.

Carter, who owns the building, acquiring it from Amtrak in 2013 along with her husband James Chase for a single dollar. The couple and their allies want to bring the structure into the 21st century following a restoration design by architect Jay Valgora of Studio V, who also did Brooklyn’s Empire Stores and the redesigned Yonkers Raceway. Plans for the depot call for a pair of new towers at either end of the building declaring it “Bronxlandia.”

“This is the beta version of it,” Carter said.

Before they owned it, the depot was subdivided into storefronts, one containing a beauty salon, a lawyer’s office and a pizzeria, she said. Part was also a topless bar. 

The timing on completing the job depends on getting tenants, putting all the financing in place, working with Amtrak to restore the track, and obtaining permits, Carter said. “We’re going to do as much restoration as we need to do, as we’d like to do, restore some of the features that we love about the old part,” including the tiles. 

Gilbert, a champion of Beaux Arts and neoclassical architecture, was a big fan of using terracotta, a form of fire-hardened clay that was popular in those times. “The whole thing was under layers of really crappy construction,” Carter said.

There is at least one other Gilbert-designed station in the Bronx at Westchester and Whitlock avenues, an ivy-covered building that was vulnerable to the elements for eight-plus decades,  she said.

In Winston-Salem, N.C., the former Union Station was restored in 2018 and 2019 and now serves as the city’s transportation traffic signal control operation. Its Beaux Arts/Neoclassical design was by a prominent New York architectural firm Fellheimer & Wagner. In its pre-1930s heyday, it was used daily by 20 passenger trains, according to the city’s website.

Another example is the Art Deco Union Station in Omaha, Neb., which has been converted into a museum. Designed by Gilbert Stanley Underwood, it was closed in 1971 and donated to the city by the Union Pacific Railroad. Kansas City’s Union Station closed in 1985, but reopened in late 2002 and serves Amtrak. But it also houses an interactive science exhibit, a planetarium and other museums, plus restaurants and retail shops.

Cincinatti’s Union Terminal was abandoned in 1972 and restored in 1991.

The rewards can go beyond simply revitalizing old architecture. Far from not recognizing the importance of the Gilbert station that is now Bronxlandia, Carter said Hunts Point residents are recognizing the venue it has in its midst, in the here and now. Still, it takes more than just a neighborhood’s fondest desires.             

“They love the idea of a little community doing cute stuff,” she said. “But real economic development that really benefits our community, they’re not all that focused on it.”

BermanCRE’s Rockville office, at 5410 Edson Lane, is its first in the D.C. region. It marks the third office for BermanCRE, following a second outpost that opened in Atlanta. 

“Berman Enterprises has been in the D.C. market for three generations and close to 80 years,” Berman told Commercial Observer. “We had always thought about having a significant presence in the D.C. area, but there were a few factors holding us back.”

That included waiting for the right person to come along to get the office up and running.

In that regard, the firm hired industry veteran Justin Shay as managing director of multifamily investment sales to lead the firm’s mid-Atlantic multifamily investment sales team. Shay is responsible for business development, client relationships, and investment sales of existing multifamily assets and development opportunities.

“I have really great respect for the Berman family and their presence in the market,” Shay told CO. “Now, it’s a little bit of a transitional market, and a little bit of a down market with the current economic environment, so we see it as a great time to come and grow and build with our collaborative brokerage environment.”

Shay comes from Transwestern, where he was senior vice president of the mid-Atlantic multifamily sales team for nearly 13 years. He brings more than 20 years of experience to his new role, and has sold more than 55,000 multifamily units throughout his career, totaling more than $6.5 billion in transaction volume.

“Ben and I share a common commitment to being trusted advisers for our clients, offering unwavering support and guidance, even in challenging market conditions,” Shay said. “Our first steps are getting the brand out there and find[ing] out what the market’s needs are in the next 12 to 18 months.” 

Berman recognizes that this is a volatile and unpredictable market for right now and the foreseeable future.

“Nobody knows where interest rates and/or cap rates are going to settle out, and our focus right now is on relationship development,” Berman said. “Whether folks have short-term debt coming up where they need to figure out what to do in any avenue, people just want to understand and process what is happening in different sectors of the market, from interest rates to cap rates to the relationship of leasing in multifamily, office, retail and industrial. Our No. 1 goal is to be that resource for clients.”

Keith Loria can be reached at Kloria@commercialobserver.com.

That’s about $1.8 million per acre of empty land. 

The site is near a Target distribution center, and about a mile and a half north of the Rialto Airport and an Amazon fulfillment center.

According to its website, Brookfield also owns a 758,940-square-foot logistics center about five miles east in Rialto. Vizzda was unable to confirm if the site is entitled for new development, and Brookfield did not immediately return a request for comment on details for its plans for the property. 

Approximately 33.6 million square feet of industrial space was under construction in the Inland Empire in the second quarter, according to a report from CBRE (CBRE). More than 4 million square feet of space was delivered from April to June, and another 4.9 million square feet in new construction broke ground.

The Inland Empire’s vacancy rate ticked up 90 basis points between the first and second quarters this year, but is still at a very strong 2.7 percent. Rialto alone has more than 36 million square feet of industrial space with a 1.7 percent vacancy rate, per CBRE.

Gregory Cornfield can be reached at gcornfield@commercialobserver.com.

“The Lisner continuing care campus will provide a unique and wonderful location for very low-income seniors to live from independent living to assisted living to nursing care, and provides a well recognized, five-star-rated level of care,” Vicki Davis, managing partner at Urban Atlantic, told Commercial Observer.

 The project is being financed through DC Department of Housing and Community Development’s Housing Production Trust Fund, federal and state low-income housing tax credits, and District of Columbia Housing Finance Administration bonds. 

Boston Financial Investment Management and Rise Impact Capital provided equity investment, and Capital One Community Finance, Cedar Rapids Bank & Trust, and DC Green Bank provided debt financing. 

The 93 one-bedroom units, designed by the architectural firm Wiencek + Associates, include 41 units priced for people earning 50 percent of median family income (MFI), or $53,250 for a one-person household. Fifty-two units will be for seniors with incomes below 30 percent of MFI, or a maximum annual income of $31,950.

Each unit will have a washer and dryer, center island, microwave and walk-in closet. 

“The Lisner home has a proud history of serving seniors in the Friendship Heights area,” Davis said. “It is important for seniors to be in a walkable community, close to shopping, transit and amenities.”

The site is across the street from parks, churches, the Friendship Heights Metro station, and shops along Western and Wisconsin avenues.   

“The new affordable senior living apartments, along with the renovation of the 1940s assisted living building, will transform the lives of the seniors we serve for generations to come,” L. Ward Orem, CEO of the Lisner-Louise-Dickson-Hurt Home, said in a prepared statement.   

Keith Loria can be reached at Kloria@commercialobserver.com.

The Portland, Maine-based F.L.Putnam — which has outposts in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island — will move into its new, larger offices in early December.

Jay Futersak, president of landlord Circle Realty Group, said that the investment firm “is a good complement to all the high-net-worth family offices we have in the building.”

“We signed four leases in the last four weeks, and we’re seeing tremendous absorption on Park Avenue,” Futersak said. “I think Park Avenue is extremely in demand. We’re busier than ever, 95 percent leased. We’re very full.”

Futersak represented the landlord in-house, while Compass’ Adelaide Polsinelli and Lauren Curcio brokered the deal for the tenant.

“445 Park Avenue’s lease is a testament that there is life in office buildings in prime Midtown locations,” said Polsinelli. “Businesses are adopting a back-to-the-office stance and have used the past few months to reorganize and rethink their needs.”

Rebecca Baird-Remba can be reached at rbairdremba@commercialobserver.com.

The five-story development will feature four residential units, each spanning 1,886 square feet, with additional commercial space. 

The application does not specify how the commercial space will be used or whether the units will be converted into condos or rentals. Attorney Michael Larkin of Bercow Radell Fernandez Larkin & Tapanes declined to comment.

Last year, Pittini paid $2.5 million for the 5,000-square-foot lot, which sits within the Ocean Beach Local Historic District, according to property records. The Miami Beach Historic Preservation Board will hear the proposal Oct. 10. 

The plan comes as Miami Beach officials are trying to shed the party image of South Of Fifth, a neighborhood home to luxury condos and high-end restaurants such as Carbone.

This year, city officials rolled back the last call for alcohol from 5 a.m. to 2 a.m for some establishments. The move forced Story, a nightclub run by David Grutman, to close. Earlier this month, city officials heard development proposals to replace the Nikki Beach day club, including one from furniture retailer RH that’s estimated to cost at least $150 million. 

Julia Echikson can be reached at jechikson@commercialobserver.com. 

Rumble, which hosts boxing-inspired classes, inked a 2,859-square-foot lease at 905 North Railroad Avenue. Next door at 915 North Railroad Avenue, Solidcore will offer intense forms of Pilates at a 2,569-square-foot studio.

On the food front, Loco Taqueria & Oyster Bar, H&H Bagels and Van Leeuwen Ice Cream are also setting up shop.

In the largest deal, Loco Taqueria & Oyster Bar, a concept from Boston, signed for 6,625 square feet at 870 North Railroad Avenue. The deal includes just over 4,500 square feet of interior space and a 2,000-square-foot patio. 

The more casual offerings — H&H and Van Leeuwen, which were both founded in New York — each inked 884-square-foot leases at 870 North Railroad Avenue and 70 North Railroad Avenue, respectively.

All five tenants are expected to open next year and are part of Nora’s first phase, which will span 154,000 square feet and house 25 ground-floor retail tenants. By repurposing warehouses across several blocks, the 40-acre development is somewhat similar to Wynwood and the Miami Design District.

Besides the retail component, the project is set to feature a 201-room hotel developed in partnership with BD Hotels and Sean MacPherson, a team behind some of New York City’s most well-known boutique hotels such as The Bowery and the refurbished Chelsea Hotel.

Julia Echikson can be reached at jechikson@commercialobserver.com. 

Thus, although Labor Day has passed, it’s still the Summer of Strikes in Los Angeles.

And it’s not just show business: Hotel workers, thousands of city and county workers, and more have mobilized picket lines at some point this year. Still, the empty soundstages and picketing celebrities will be the most identifiable story of 2023 locally.

Of course, on top of that, offices and some major shopping centers are extraordinarily quiet, too, these days, without any sort of labor strike. The effects of rising interest rates, a new transfer tax in L.A. for pricier sales, and all the other headwinds are hitting L.A. as hard and sometimes harder than anywhere else in the country.

There are anchor tenants ditching office towers, as well as institutional property owners handing over the keys to landmark high-rises to their lenders. In fact, Southern California has seen the sharpest declines in office values in the nation this year. The few towers that are sold are traded for major losses. And some of the most troubled assets in L.A. have quickly become the go-to examples around the country to epitomize the generational decline.

Thankfully for the industry, behind the scenes, Southern California remains the biggest and busiest industrial market in the nation. Amid the aforementioned slowdown, it appears industrial is the safest bet among the major asset classes. 

Rather than decline, the market for logistics and warehousing space is plateauing, or “normalizing” as CEOs like to put it. But, indeed, the biggest commercial real estate deals in the region moneywise are industrial sales and financings. That’s why the easiest honorees to select for the Power L.A. list this year were the likes of Rexford and Prologis (PLD), which are still expanding via nine-, 10-, and even 11-figure investments.

Otherwise, amid the economic sea change, this list showcases the durability of housing and the biggest multifamily landlords much more so than in years past. With the lack of hope for any resolution to the housing crisis in the nearterm — in a L.A. County where most residents are renters — there’s no question apartment landlords have stability others pine for.

That’s why Irvine Company, Equity Residential (EQR) and AvalonBay — the biggest multifamily landlords you can find in Southern California — are highlighted this year.

But perhaps the honoree most emblematic of the state of the market is Jamison Group (which owns the fifth most rental units in the city of L.A.). The private, L.A.-based development firm has been converting underperforming office space into residential properties since well before the pandemic and the new era of remote work. Seems pretty advantageous now, doesn’t it?

Reporting by Greg Cornfield. Additional reporting by Tom Acitelli, Rebecca Baird-Remba, Andrew Coen, Cathy Cunningham, Chava Courarie, Max Gross, Mark Hallum, Abigail Nehring, Brian Pascus and Nicholas Rizzi.