Life will feel a lot more normal by spring/summer (Q2). By this time, the various vaccines should be broadly available (at least in the developed world). This is something that never happened during the Spanish Flu. From what I have read, the Spanish Flu lasted about two years and there were four major waves, the second of which was by far the most deadly. Ultimately, a vaccine was never found. It just petered out as people developed immunity. But medicine then was not what it is today, so surely we are destined to do better.

What happens with working from home is going to be one of the most important outcomes of 2021. Right now it feels like tech vs. commercial real estate. The tech industry has been quick to renounce offices (while many large tech companies continued to lease more space through 2020). And the commercial real estate industry has naturally pointed out that we’re all still going to need physical offices.

My view is that, yes, people appreciate the flexibility of being able to work remotely, but that we’re greatly exaggerating the extent to which work is going to disperse in the short-term. I think it comes down to three main things. 1) It’s nice being around other humans, both in the office and for those after work drinks. 2) Collaborative and knowledge-intensive endeavors work better when people are in the same room. And 3) corporate politics will encourage people to return to the office. Who do you think is going to get promoted first, the person who Zooms in from the Caribbean for meetings or the person who shows up to the office and grinds it out every day?

As the world returns to normal, we will, however, see an explosion in global travel. Many will be questioning how Airbnb’s sky-high valuation makes any sort of sense, but it’ll have the right story for what’s going on in the world (some people call these “story stocks”). The reality is that there will be a massive amount of pent up demand that starts to come out as soon as people start to feel safe and governments start to allow people to travel en masse. I’m already looking forward to the 2021-2022 ski season, which I fully expect to be a blockbuster season.

Because of this, we will see a decline in recreational real estate. The kind that was fulfilling people’s need for local travel during this pandemic. Instead, people will turn their attention to more international experiences and try and make up for lost time. Many will also come to realize that the whole working from home thing didn’t stick as expected and so they’ll start deriving less utility from their property outside of the city. Expect a kind of reversion to the mean when it comes to prices.

Urban/downtown real estate will strongly rebound in the second half of 2021. As restaurants reopen, as people return to offices, and as urban life in general resumes, we will see an increase in demand for condos/apartments, and probably larger urban spaces given the run-up in prices for single-family homes that many cities saw last year. (A bit more on this point can be found over here.)

The trends that are being accelerated as a result of this pandemic are not going to stop, though their rate of increase will temper. The apps and platforms that people started using in 2020, perhaps for the first time, have established new habits. People’s credit cards are now on file and it’ll be very easy for those online habits to remain. But the opposing force to all of this will be the strong desire for socializing, travel, and novel experiences. It’ll be the more routine stuff that will continue to live entirely on our phones.

The restaurant/food industry will bounce back in a slightly different form. Sadly, many businesses will have failed. But we will also see an explosion in new ideas and new concepts, satisfying our demand to be out socializing and trying new things throughout the new roaring twenties. Ghost kitchens and on-demand food delivery companies will continue to disaggregate how some restaurants are setup. Companies like Uber will see their ride-sharing businesses quickly snap back, which will more than offset the decline in food delivery as people resume eating out.

Public transit ridership probably won’t return to its pre-pandemic levels until at least the fall. Possibly late fall. This is going to be a serious problem for the various levels of government that subsidize virtually all public transit authorities. Many transit networks have seen ridership declines of 70% or so and, if my timing projections are correct, that will have been the case for about a year and a half.

The migration from high tax states (like California and New York) to low tax states (like Texas and Florida) will continue. This trend was well underway before COVID-19 and so I don’t see it reversing. What is perhaps more interesting to consider is how this dispersion of economic activity will ultimately play out against some of the centralizing/polarizing forces of the global economy. Urban agglomeration economies aren’t going to go away.

To end, I will say that I think it’s safe to assume that we’re all looking forward to the world getting back to normal, whatever that happens to mean. But ironically, once that happens, I reckon that some of us might look back on this period of time and feel hints of nostalgia. Perhaps you learned a new skill or perhaps you were able to spend more time with love ones. Time and distance may better reveal these silver linings.

Onward, my friends. What a time to be alive.

According to Amazon's recent annual 10-K filing, the company leased and owned (most of their space is leased) about 288,419,000 square feet of space around the world at the end of 2018. Of this number, about 80% is used for "fulfillment, data centers, and other." Amazon doesn't break out this line item any further, but GeekWire reckons that a good 3/4 of their real estate is dedicated to their fulfillment warehouses.

Here's the full summary of their facilities (from the 10-K filing):

Given that fulfillment is such a large share of their properties, I am most interested in understanding the geography of their warehouses and how that impacts their core value proposition, which is largely all about convenience.

In April 2017, Jean-François Houde (of Cornell), Peter Newberry (of Penn State), and Katja Seim (of UPenn) published a paper on this very topic called, "Economies of Density in E-Commerce: A Study of Amazon’s Fulfillment Center Network." There's also this Knowledge@Wharton podcast on the paper if you're looking for a quicker listen or read.

In the early days of online retail, the decision of where to warehouse had meaningful tax implications. Because (in most cases in the US?) you only had to collect sales tax if you had a physical presence in the same location as your purchasers.

As that changed, it then made more sense to create a broader distribution network and minimize the distance between fulfillment center and purchaser. By 2016, Bloomberg estimated that nearly 78 million Americans lived in a zip code where Amazon offered free same-dame delivery. That number has obviously increased since.

And in the paper "Economies of Density", they discovered the following cost savings as a result of Amazon's growing fulfillment network:

We find that Amazon saves between $0.17 and $0.47 for every 100-mile reduction in the distance of shipping goods worth $30. In the context of its distribution network expansion, this estimate implies that Amazon has reduced its total shipping cost by over 50% and increased its profit margin by between 5 and 14% since 2006. Separately, we demonstrate that prices on Amazon have fallen by approximately 40% over the same period, suggesting that a significant share of the cost savings have been passed on to consumers.

The interesting question for real estate people and city builders -- which is brought up in the Knowledge@Wharton podcast but is difficult to answer -- is whether there are diminishing returns to this "economies of density" phenomenon. In other words, how dense does Amazon's fulfillment network want to be?

The Globe and Mail recently published an excellent article on “how e-commerce is driving a real estate revolution.” This is a topic that I’m very interested in: how online manifests itself offline.

Not surprisingly, the article talks a lot about Amazon, including their 4th warehouse in the Greater Toronto Area, which is an 850,000 square foot facility in Brampton equipped with 350-pound robots (8050 Heritage Road).

The first thing I did after reading the article was figure out the location of all of Amazon’s fulfillment centers in the GTA. Amazon doesn’t seem to publish this. But according to TaxJar, they are here (I mapped out the addresses):

There are two in Brampton at the precise location where Hwy 407 (toll route) and Hwy 401 meet. The other three are distributed along Hwy 401 in Milton and in Mississauga.

Now let’s get back to that Globe and Mail article:

- In 6 years, Amazon has leased over 2 million square feet of warehouse space in Canada.

- Toronto is the third largest warehouse market in North America. It represents 43% of Canada’s total inventory.

- Average net rents have increased 9.7% over the past year and vacancy rates have dropped to 2.7% (CBRE data). In Vancouver, those same numbers are 5.1% and 3%, respectively.

- Online shopping is thought to account for about 6.5% of all retail sales in Canada. But in Toronto, 23% of all industrial space is already e-commerce-related (CBRE data, again).

- CBRE believes that every $1 billion in new online sales per year requires an additional 1.25 million square feet of warehouse space. 

- Based on online sales projections, Canada needs another 27.5 million square feet of industrial space over the next 5 years. We don’t have that much space in the pipeline.

- Clear heights are increasing for stacking purposes. Amazon’s new Brampton facility is 45 feet tall / 4 floors. 10 years ago new warehouses were 26 feet tall.

- Average sale price of warehouses in the GTA has gone from $119.35 psf to $142.19 psf over the last year.

Perhaps the most interesting takeaway from the article is the discussion around “last mile” distribution hubs. These are fulfillment centers located closer to the city, which are used to offer shorter delivery times: 

“…instead of having inventory stored for days or months, these fulfilment centres will turn over their inventory in one day, sometimes twice a day.”

This is something that I addressed in my recent presentation about the “mall of the future” at B+H’s retail design charrette. Where do these physical distribution centers want to be as online sales continue to grow and delivery times continue to compress? Where’s the future growth?

According to this article, it’s going to be in “last mile” fulfillment real estate – relatively smaller spaces that are located very close or directly in the city center.

Photo by Samuel Zeller on Unsplash