Chicago Commercial Real Estate – In the News

Tom’s Recommended Reading for the Week

  1. Coworking 2.0: Collaboration meets privacy in the workplace – Last year marked the 50th anniversary of the cubicle, and while few people dispute the impact this workplace wonder has had on office design and culture, most agree that cubicles have come to symbolize the old way of doing business. Today, companies have transitioned to more open floor plans designed to foster creativity and collaboration among employees. In fact, open offices accounted for 70 percent of workplaces in a 2010 survey conducted by the International Management Facility Association… RE Journals
  2. JLL snares tech-focused broker Cassata from CBRE – Office leasing broker Chris Cassata, who has signed some of the technology sector’s biggest names to leases in Chicago, joined Jones Lang LaSalle after 14 years at rival CBRE. Cassata, 38, who has represented Chicago developer Sterling Bay in leases with tenants including Google and Twitter, will focus on adding new assignments outside the realm of traditional glass-and-steel skyscrapers… Crain’s Chicago
  3. Millennials Prefer Single-Family Homes in the Suburbs – One of the hottest debates among housing economists these days isn’t the trajectory of home sales, but whether millennials, those born in the 1980s and 1990s, want to remain urbanites or eventually relocate to the suburbs. Some demographers and economists argue that the preference of millennials, also called Generation Y, for city living will remain long lasting. And surveys of these young urban residents have tended to show that they don’t mind small living quarters as long as they have access to mass transit and are close to entertainment… Wall Street Journal
  4. Should Core Investors Chase Yield Into Slower Growth Markets? – Commercial real estate investors are flocking to secondary and even tertiary markets in search of yield. This is due to a variety of factors, including an overall low yield environment and risk complacency. In addition, similar to the Federal Reserve “crowding” investors out of Treasuries into higher yielding investments, foreign buyers of U.S. commercial real estate are “crowding” domestic investors out of gateway office markets into higher yielding secondary and tertiary markets… NREI
  5. Top 5 Predictions for Medical Office Real Estate in 2015 – The “retailization” of healthcare will continue to increase this year, according to executives at Revista, an Annapolis, Md.-based research firm that focuses on the medical real estate industry. Revista was founded in 2013 by seniors housing industry veterans Elisa Infante Freeman, Mike Hargrave and Hilda Flower Martin. The company tracks investment sales and construction statistics in the medical office sector, as well as publishing the Top 50 Owners report for the industry. … NREI