Friday, October 9th, 2009
In the past several years, much has been written about the proposed and controversial redevelopment plans for the boardwalk and adjacent amusement parks of Coney Island. While a great deal of the attention has been focused on the redevelopment plans of Thor Equities, the once popular Brooklyn seaside resort does not lack in alternative schemes suggested by everyone from theme park managers to the Bloomberg administration to the Municipal Art Society of New York.
In short, opposition to Thor’s plan have been centered around the firm’s plan for as many as a 1,000 hotel rooms and 500,000 square feet of retail space including some big boxes. Alternative suggestions for Coney Island range from “three or four wind in your face rides” to an “eye-popping” attraction akin to the London Eye – not bad suggestions but clearly the product of observers that lack a real sense of the historic Coney Island, let alone what is requires to make the redevelopment an economic success. (more…)
Tags: amusement, andrew lloyd webber, Bloomberg, coney island, new york, redevelopment, Retail, the phantom of the opera, theatre, Thor
Posted in Culture, Real Estate Development, Retail, Specialty Retail | No Comments »
Wednesday, September 30th, 2009
Over the past 6 weeks we have seen our daily readership of our blogs and traffic to our web site almost double. Visitors vary widely and range from Brazil to Southeast Asia and from the Middle East and India to Europe and North America. As our readership continues to grow we will add many new points of view and share more insights derived from our projects and clients located around the world. As we grow, we want you to feel at home in our next generation of community building with the introduction of MyVillageSolution.com early next year. You can help us grow by adding your own points of view to our blogs and sending your friends links to our site.
Occasionally, one of our readers will ask us questions concerning the services we provide. In brief, we are marketplace crafters in the sense that we define a market opportunity and then craft a built environment to answer the needs of merchants, restaurants, entertainment venues and most importantly the consumer. On the surface, it may appear to the more casual reader that we are something between architects and real estate developers. While we posses many of the same skills, our core competency is our ability to interpret trends both current and future in contemporary culture and translate those into the marketplace. As such, we do extensive market research, create multi retail marketplace concepts, direct the design execution and recruit merchants.
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Tags: development, market, market research, mobile market, Real Estate, Retail, Village Solutions
Posted in Culture, Real Estate, Real Estate Development, Retail, Shopping Centers, Specialty Retail | No Comments »
Tuesday, September 8th, 2009
Whole Foods
Sales at Whole Foods continue to slide with sales down 4.8% in their last quarter. The upscale super market is facing new competition from the major chains such as Kroger and Safeway and has a core shopper problem that buys items rather than an entire cart of goods. Likewise, many of their core shoppers have switched to cheaper goods within the store and to lower priced retailers such as Traders Joe.
On top of competitive and consumer problems the company is trying to swallow a pill of bad real estate decisions. A combination of too many stores in marginal markets; markets that are too small for a new generation of larger stores up to 80,000 square feet; and high rents have significantly reduced profits. In response the chain has slowed new store openings from a planned 25-30 for 2009 but openings have been scaled back to 15.
More importantly, Whole Foods has begun a major repositioning program where it is moving away from gourmet foods to natural food and healthy eating. Likewise, founder John Mackey has vowed to remove the junk food from his store. Makes you wonder how he is going to fill up all of those oversized stores acquired in the last few years.
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Tags: economy, market, Retail, sales
Posted in Retail | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, August 19th, 2009
The media is quick to point out the dismal sales performance of numerous retail chains. Reports of significant decreases in comp sales are reported daily and full economic recovery is clearly tied to a resurgence of retail sales. While, the end of the recession may be near, retail sales will lag far behind a recovery. Why? There are too many consumers with too much debt, high unemployment, and homes under water to consider shopping for anything other than necessities. With consumer expenditures accounting for almost 70% of all economic activity and without a confident consumer, retail sales are going to continue in their depressed state, even as other signs of a recovery appear to be positive.
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Tags: consumer, consumer spending, economy, Real Estate, recession, Retail
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Tuesday, August 18th, 2009
One of the most misused statistics in researching trade areas is that of average household income, because median income figures are often confused with average and mean incomes. An average household income is obtained by adding up the income of all homes in a study area and then dividing it by the number of home units in the study area. Conversely, a median household income is the middle number in a string of values where half of the numbers are above the median and half are below. A simple example could be in a remote area where three of five homes have annual incomes of $40,000, $40,000 and $60,000 respectively and another two houses have incomes of $200,000 each. In this example, the median income would be $60,000, but the average income would be $108,000. In this case, the median income of $60,000 would tell you very little about the buying power of the neighborhood and the fact that the homes with incomes of $200,000 would typically spend substantially more than those households at the median or below. How much more? – three to five times more than the average income.
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Tags: household income
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Tuesday, July 28th, 2009
I have long predicted a fundamental shift in the retail distribution channel by a new and lasting divide between fixed brick and mortar retail locations and other points of purchase, other than online shopping.
In brief the fixed marketplace is going to go mobile. But this is not another catch phrase for web based purchasing from PDAs, and cell phones. What I am talking about is a market place that is mobile and fluid. This is a market that goes to the consumer rather than the consumer going to the mall. Think in terms of the circus coming into town for a 10 day run and then packing up and moving to the next town. Translated into a real mobile marketplace, think of a vintage produce truck locating on campus and selling soaps from fruit baskets and fruit crates.
However many experts will point out that this is more prophecy than predictive calculation, given previous predictions on the long term impact of internet shopping. But we believe that some emerging changes may even be more profound than online retailing and involve many more levels and channels than on-line shopping. In this scenario, technology will only be a component of the new channel but hardly the defining mechanism. Most importantly, the new mobile channel will disconnect from fixed location and it will change the static shopping centers. Consequently, all parties connected to any retail development will therefore, require a complete comprehension of these coming changes in the consumer goods distribution channels in order to properly position their developments. (more…)
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Monday, July 27th, 2009
Over the past decades I have worked in almost every major metropolitan area in the United States. In this capacity I often encounter reports that the subject market is significantly under stored. While doing my market research I am always amazed to find newspaper articles reporting that a market has significantly less retail space than the national average which always turns out to be wrong. So, I will share some insights into one of the biggest myths in the retail real estate industry – “my market has significantly less retail space than the national average”.
The proliferation of this myth falls right into the lap of an uninformed media which appears to want to take a position of supporting growth or showing that an area is over stored with retail space. This is because of the rapid expansion of power centers in the 1990s; lifestyle centers after 2000; and free standing mega stores in recent years have all contributed to a crowded retail landscape. Therefore, in an attempt by the media to quantify the amount of retail space and to compare the density of retail in one market to another, retail space per capita has been used as a common indicator. However, our analysis concludes that these types of numbers are among the most misquoted and misunderstood data points in the analysis of retail real estate. The problem is like the old joke – “one lies and the other swears to it”. In this case, retail space per capita is the number that is often, if not almost always, reported inaccurately and then the next article repeats it all over again and before you know it, you have a fact that everyone relies on. But, when comparing vastly different markets and using so called national averages one may end up with nothing more than a comparison of apples to oranges.
The most commonly used database on retail space comes from The National Research Bureau (NRB); however, they only include shopping centers and not the total of all retail space. Consequently, shopping center data has often been incorrectly used as a total for all retail space and then compared to the local population to generate a per capita number. In brief, the retail space per capita that is often quoted is actually shopping center space and not retail space.
This type of comparison works well as a barometer across the United States, but it is highly inconsistent when using it as a source of retail density in major urban areas that have a large amount of retail not located in shopping centers.
According to many, NRB[1] is the premier provider of retail real estate information in the U.S. Its database of information contains information on over 40,500 shopping centers which is the most comprehensive and detailed information source on U.S. retail properties available. Likewise, NRB has prepared the Shopping Center Census for the past 20 years, which is published by the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC) and by the U.S. Department of Commerce / U.S. Census Bureau in Statistical Abstracts of the United States. The NRB census is widely considered the authoritative source to calculate the retail area per capita. While the NRB is an excellent source for shopping center gross leasable areas (GLA), it is insufficient when analyzing per capita GLA for urban areas for a number of reasons.
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Tags: Florida, GLA, ICSC, leasing, lifestyle center, Miami, NRB, real estate myths, retail space per capita, square footage
Posted in Real Estate, Real Estate Development, Retail, Shopping Centers, Specialty Retail | 1 Comment »
Friday, July 17th, 2009
In the book Small Wonder, author Jonathan Zimmerman, covers the history of the one room school house and describes how the Little Red School House became an American icon. In his book he poses the question which asks if the school house is a relic or an enduring and relevant image of American Culture.
Mr. Zimmerman notes that the one-room schools were “a central venue for community life in rural America.” He also described the rift that emerged between urban elites seeking greater control over the national educational system and rural values that emphasized liberty and democratic self control. The debate was obviously won by the centralists and resulted in the closure of almost all of the small schools in favor of the predominantly larger, standard tested, and efficient warehouse-like schools by the mid 1950s.
Over time the one room school house became a symbol of rural individualism and home front democracy and the larger schools became the symbol of a centralized, spotless, and well planned educational system. Often the debate became more about hickory stick justice, monkey trials and school prayer but eventually it was framed primarily as an efficient consolidation of schools to provide a better education. Yet, the leading proponents were often the highway and automobile lobbies that sought reasons to expand highways and the new consolidated primary and high schools presented a compelling reason. In the end the classic themes of liberty and self rule lost out to a bigger and more enlightened educational system.
While Mr. Zimmerman chronicled many of the strengths of the small school that included individualized study programs, self guided study working at one’s own pace and group learning; it eventually was challenged because it represented local and community control which often taught values that were very different from those in larger urban areas.
In the end of the book, Mr. Zimmerman’s Small Wonder, raises a question: Did the benefit of the technologically advanced educational warehouse off-set the lost soul of the communities? In a Wall Street Journal review of the book by Bill Kauffman he poses the question. “I wonder if Americans will ever tire of chasing after the gods of Progress and Bigness and rediscover the little things, red school houses among them, that once gave us our soul”. I too wonder, if other icons of a lost era will be rediscovered, valued and re-invented for the sake of real communities?
Tags: american culture, american icon, Jonathan Zimmerman, Little Red School House, Small Wonder
Posted in Culture | No Comments »