Tuesday, April 20th, 2010
Below is an article about our president, Rick Hill, reprinted from the Courier-Journal.
Run or draw.
That was a decision Rick Hill had to make as an undergraduate at the University of Kentucky nearly 40 years ago. A native of Bardstown, he wanted to be an architect but when he signed up for classes and found that mandatory studio times conflicted with running, he picked running.
“I made a career decision right there,” he recalled.
Maybe not so much.
Despite a long career in marketing shopping centers from his base in Charlotte, N.C., and a lifelong interest in running, Hill never lost his urge to design. He just reinvented himself as a real estate strategist and designer.
(more…)
Tags: design, marketplace crafting, Real Estate, Retail Changes, Rick Hill
Posted in Company News, Industry News, Real Estate, Retail, Shopping Centers, Specialty Retail | No Comments »
Monday, December 28th, 2009
In 2008 I made 10 trips to Dubai and worked on two projects. In doing so, I met many wonderful people and saw a good deal of projects that were beyond belief. A good deal of these projects were completed and many more will never be built. In general, I found the Emiratis to be gracious host and the hired help to be less than forth coming. Outlined below are my observations.
(more…)
Tags: development, Dubai, Dubailand, UAE, Wafi
Posted in Culture, Real Estate, Real Estate Development, Retail, Shopping Centers | No Comments »
Thursday, October 29th, 2009
It seems like everywhere you look, retailers are closing shop and filing bankruptcies, and empty storefronts are lining the streets. Last year we saw the closing of retail giants, Circuit City and Linens N’ Things, and luxury retailers such as Versace also closed stores around the world. So why is it that Legoland Discovery Center, an attraction centered on the LEGO building blocks, is opening stores in Chicago, Dallas and Atlanta?
I believe Legoland sees an opportunity in the recession because consumers are looking for free or affordable cost entertainment in their malls. This trend also corresponds to a consumer who expects their news to be free on the web. Consequently, we see malls across the globe add entertainment and amusement venues to draw consumers who have relegated shopping to obligatory time, which is something close to work. These consumers are bored with the same stores in every mall and with higher gas prices, lost home values and depressed 401K accounts they do not have the funds for a shopping spree.
(more…)
Tags: bahrain, Disney Store, Dubai, entertainment, lego, Legoland, mall of emirates, malls, shopping center, shopping mall, ski dubai, wahoo water park
Posted in Culture, Real Estate, Retail, Shopping Centers | 1 Comment »
Friday, October 9th, 2009
Lego
Lego has opened its first concept store in Concord Mills, located north of Charlotte, NC. The 4,520 square foot store has been designed to create an interaction between children with on-site master builders. The store has room for birthday parties and classes.
New World
A new world is likely to emerge in which designers rebel against long lead times and where they take their collections directly to the consumer through their own boutiques, trunk shows, and over the web.
Web Sales
Web sales are projected to reach $156 billion in 2009, representing 6% of the total U.S. retail pie
The Web Fashion Consumer
Consumers have come to expect new merchandise more frequently, thanks to the web and fast fashion retailers such as H & M. Many cannot understand why they have to wait 6 months to see the fashions seen on the runways. Buyers at department stores generally base their orders on the past, while fashion editors gravitate to the most photogenic and future looking styles, leaving the consumer stuck in the middle. This results in one facet of the fashion industry looking forward and the other looking backwards. The consequence: a consumer on one hand is told what to buy but on the other, not where to buy it.
In response, a new generation of fashion retailers is emerging on the web where news is freely given and fashion is sold. Net-a-porter with average sales of $820.00 per transaction and customers from 170 countries is one example of this new generation of merchants. The company has successfully merged its web retail site with a fashion news site catering to a new consumer who wants credible news over magazine advertisements and the most up to date fashion now.
Entertainment
Families spent 5.1% more on entertainment in 2008 than in 2009, something that has surprised many economists. As consumers tightened their pocket books and wallets one would expect entertainment to be one of the first categories to see significant decreases. But the 5.1% increase in spending equated to 16.5 billion more dollars spent in the category over 2007.
Household debt
The American family is trying to put money into savings and reduce their overall debt, but they are clearly not faring as well as one might expect in this recession. Household debt now amounts to about 125% of after tax income.
High Net Worth Individuals
Luxury retailers are faced with a significant decline in Americans with a high net worth defined as having $1,000,000 of assets available for investment. In 2008 the assets of these individuals dropped by as much as 22%. The result is a major decrease in sales at retailers such as Neiman Marcus where sales have decreased by over 20% in 2009 over 2008.
Tags: consumer, consumer spending, consumerism, entertainment, fashion, fashion trends, household income, japan, lego, luxury, online sales, online shopping, recession, Retail, versace, web sales
Posted in Culture, Real Estate, Retail, Shopping Centers, Specialty Retail, Uncategorized | No Comments »
Friday, October 9th, 2009
While the residential market may be showing some signs of recovery, vacancies in commercial properties continue to rise at an alarming rate. In short, non-enclosed shopping centers reached a 10.3% vacancy rate ending in the third quarter of 2009, and enclosed malls jumped to 8.6%.
And it certainly is not looking to get better for some time. As vacancies increased, average rents declined to $16.89 per square foot for non-enclosed centers and down to $39.18 for enclosed malls. Likewise, the Federal Reserve has reported 8,300 store closings including 1,500 large anchor stores in 2009 alone.
Nationwide, office vacancies and rents are faring worse. The vacancy rate, in office properties hit a five-year high at 16.5% in the third quarter of this year. The decline in occupancy came as 19.6 million square feet of office space was returned to landlords in the third quarter and 64.2 million for the year.
As bad as the current environment is for landlords, things will become bleaker as unemployment rises because office occupancy tends to trail employment by 18 to 24 months.
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 »
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
Posted in Real Estate, Real Estate Development, Retail, Shopping Centers, Specialty Retail | No Comments »
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 »