Friday, September 25th, 2009
Below is a reprint of the Broken Sidewalk articel on Creation Gardens and the Service Welding and Machine site.
Concept plan of how the Service Tanks block could one day be redeveloped
Faced with the uncertain future of its current location in the path of the planned Spaghetti Junction expansion and looking for room to expand, Creation Gardens, a local distributor of wholesale produce and gourmet foods, plans to relocate its facilities into the heart of the East Market Street – Nulu corridor.
Creation Gardens owners Ron and Mollie Turnier have placed three parcels on East Market between Clay and Shelby Streets under contract and plan to build a state-of-the-art retail and commercial distribution center on the corner of Market and Shelby Streets. The land is currently occupied by the Neurath & Underwood Funeral Home and a gravel lot used to store tanks for the adjacent Service Welding and Machine business which will to continue to operate at its current location. (more…)
Tags: creation gardens, Louisville, market, preservation, urban, urban development, urban district, urban renaissance
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Friday, September 25th, 2009
Below is a reprint of the article about Village Solutions’ Bellegrove project from Broken Sidewalk.
Bellegrove Executive Campus Rendering
There’s more development activity set for downtown Anchorage, which has been slowly transforming itself over the last couple of years. This time, Village Solutions plans to convert two historic structures and build several new buildings in an effort to create a unique office development centered around a formal English courtyard. The property once belonged to Belleview Home, but was recently sold for redevelopment.
Village Solutions plans to eventually build three new Jeffersonian-style structures to match the historic architecture, anchored by Boone Hall, the original girl’s dormitory at Bellwood. The development, dubbed Bellegrove strives to preserve and protect the environment and create an abundance of green space and gardens. Developer Rick Hill envisions 5 buildings in a botanical garden setting with groves of 100 year old trees all around. Already, a creative center is finishing up construction and a reproduction facility for large-format graphics and printing is planned.
Plans call for leaving much of the 4.5 acre site open. A large “outdoor living room” will link the new structures, that, when complete, could encompass around 22,000 square feet. The site could have supported more than double the space under conventional development standards, but Hill wanted to create a special project for the historic neighborhood. He studied the original layout of the buildings to maintain a perceived master plan following Olmsted principles. (more…)
Tags: Anchorage, Bellegrove, development, green development, Louisville, Olmstead, Village Solutions
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Friday, September 25th, 2009
Below is a reprint of the Courier Journal article on Creation Gardens.
The owners of Creation Gardens, a distributor of produce to restaurants and the food-service industry, plans to move to a new site and expand their business.
Ron and Mollie Turnier have signed contracts to purchase about two acres of property on the northwest corner of Market and Shelby streets, including the Neurath & Underwood Funeral Home.
They plan to build a retail and commercial distribution center, featuring a 27,000 square foot building. It would include a 17,000-square-foot, regional fresh-food and produce distribution center primarily for commercial customers and a 10,000-square-foot market open to the public. (more…)
Tags: Butchertown, creation gardens, Louisville, market, Retail, urban district
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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.
(more…)
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.
(more…)
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 | 3 Comments »