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A friend of mine was in Scottsdale last month for an ICSC conference where Garrick H. Brown (VP of Retail Research for the Americas at Cushman & Wakefield) delivered this retail presentation.
My friend flipped it to me this week and below are a couple of slides that stood out as I scanned through it.
Apparently over the last five years, a new dollar store has opened every four hours in the US. That’s how quickly this category is growing. A race to the bottom.
Food halls are hot and not just in the US. Check out: “5 huge food halls opening soon in Toronto”.
This is similar to a chart I posted a few weeks ago that pegged online grocery shopping in South Korea at closer to 20%. I’m still fascinated by this market share number and want to better understand what’s driving it.
This is an interesting chart that shows the relationship between retail square footage per capita and sales per square foot per capita. The US has lots of retail space per capita but low sales. Now look at Germany.
Finally, this is a chart that shows where household growth is expected to happen from 2016 to 2025. It follows a very clear historical trend of Americans moving from cold places to warmer/hot places.
For the full presentation, click here.
A number of you have asked if I’m moving to New York. I can see why that was inferred from some of my posts, but that was actually not my intention. I am not moving to New York. (Sorry New York friends. I’ll visit soon.)
Toronto is home base. I hope it’s clear how much I love this city. Sure, I’m a big fan of New York and Miami and Vancouver and Berlin and Tokyo and Jackson (to name some of the places I have on my phone’s weather app), but I made a deliberate choice to station myself here.
Because unlike some of the other industries I write about on this blog, city building is hyper local. What I do involves the built environment. And that doesn’t generally happen via a laptop on a beach in Bali (at least not for extended periods of time).
It happens by being on the ground, interfacing with local communities, meeting face-to-face with the city, and poring over drawings with smart people who know far more about their respective disciplines than I ever will. It is a collaborative and local effort. It’s about getting into the details.
And so to be successful in this business, I think it helps to find a home and take long bets. I’m not saying that I will never work on projects in other cities (I have and I would), but I am saying that I’m not moving to New York right now and that home remains Toronto.
The big news in the (Canadian) retail world this morning is that Target has confirmed that it will be shutting down its entire Canadian operation. That means 133 stores will close and about 17,600 employees will soon be out of work. Here’s what the CEO had to say:
“After a thorough review of our Canadian performance and careful consideration of the implications of all options, we were unable to find a realistic scenario that would get Target Canada to profitability until at least 2021,” said Brian Cornell, who became the new chief executive officer last summer.
I can already hear the keyboards typing as business schools across Canada and the world prepare this case study: Why did Target Canada fail after not even 2 years?
I don’t really want to focus on that in this post, but my initial sense is that they came in too big and too undifferentiated. Maybe they underestimated the particularities of the Canadian market and shopper, but they certainly didn’t come in lean.
They bought up over a hundred Zellers leases and used that platform to obtain a critical mass quickly. But the problem with this approach is that it meant lots of upfront costs and fewer opportunities to adjust as they gained real feedback from the market.
Regardless of what happened, I’m more interested in what the impact will be to the retail real estate industry going forward. Remember, Target is an anchor. And when it entered Canada, it was viewed as an opportunity to refresh some of our tired malls – many of which were already showing signs of dying.
So what happens now? Who comes in to fill their shoes?
Image: Flickr
A friend of mine was in Scottsdale last month for an ICSC conference where Garrick H. Brown (VP of Retail Research for the Americas at Cushman & Wakefield) delivered this retail presentation.
My friend flipped it to me this week and below are a couple of slides that stood out as I scanned through it.
Apparently over the last five years, a new dollar store has opened every four hours in the US. That’s how quickly this category is growing. A race to the bottom.
Food halls are hot and not just in the US. Check out: “5 huge food halls opening soon in Toronto”.
This is similar to a chart I posted a few weeks ago that pegged online grocery shopping in South Korea at closer to 20%. I’m still fascinated by this market share number and want to better understand what’s driving it.
This is an interesting chart that shows the relationship between retail square footage per capita and sales per square foot per capita. The US has lots of retail space per capita but low sales. Now look at Germany.
Finally, this is a chart that shows where household growth is expected to happen from 2016 to 2025. It follows a very clear historical trend of Americans moving from cold places to warmer/hot places.
For the full presentation, click here.
A number of you have asked if I’m moving to New York. I can see why that was inferred from some of my posts, but that was actually not my intention. I am not moving to New York. (Sorry New York friends. I’ll visit soon.)
Toronto is home base. I hope it’s clear how much I love this city. Sure, I’m a big fan of New York and Miami and Vancouver and Berlin and Tokyo and Jackson (to name some of the places I have on my phone’s weather app), but I made a deliberate choice to station myself here.
Because unlike some of the other industries I write about on this blog, city building is hyper local. What I do involves the built environment. And that doesn’t generally happen via a laptop on a beach in Bali (at least not for extended periods of time).
It happens by being on the ground, interfacing with local communities, meeting face-to-face with the city, and poring over drawings with smart people who know far more about their respective disciplines than I ever will. It is a collaborative and local effort. It’s about getting into the details.
And so to be successful in this business, I think it helps to find a home and take long bets. I’m not saying that I will never work on projects in other cities (I have and I would), but I am saying that I’m not moving to New York right now and that home remains Toronto.
The big news in the (Canadian) retail world this morning is that Target has confirmed that it will be shutting down its entire Canadian operation. That means 133 stores will close and about 17,600 employees will soon be out of work. Here’s what the CEO had to say:
“After a thorough review of our Canadian performance and careful consideration of the implications of all options, we were unable to find a realistic scenario that would get Target Canada to profitability until at least 2021,” said Brian Cornell, who became the new chief executive officer last summer.
I can already hear the keyboards typing as business schools across Canada and the world prepare this case study: Why did Target Canada fail after not even 2 years?
I don’t really want to focus on that in this post, but my initial sense is that they came in too big and too undifferentiated. Maybe they underestimated the particularities of the Canadian market and shopper, but they certainly didn’t come in lean.
They bought up over a hundred Zellers leases and used that platform to obtain a critical mass quickly. But the problem with this approach is that it meant lots of upfront costs and fewer opportunities to adjust as they gained real feedback from the market.
Regardless of what happened, I’m more interested in what the impact will be to the retail real estate industry going forward. Remember, Target is an anchor. And when it entered Canada, it was viewed as an opportunity to refresh some of our tired malls – many of which were already showing signs of dying.
So what happens now? Who comes in to fill their shoes?
Image: Flickr
On that note, here’s what I have to tell you. Later this year I’ll be joining Slate Asset Management as VP of Development.
A bit about Slate:
Slate is one of the most active acquirers, owners, and managers of real estate in Canada right now. Founded in 2005 by two brothers (Blair and Brady), Slate has over $3 billion of assets under management across over 16 million square feet and over 130 properties.
All of this is done through four main investment vehicles:
1) The first is Slate Advisors. It acts on behalf of and alongside private institutional investors — such as Greystone.
2) The second is Slate Office REIT (TSE:SOT.UN). It is a pure play Canadian office REIT focused on downtown and suburban properties all across the country.
3) The third is Slate Retail REIT (TSX:SRT.U). It is a pure play REIT entirely focused on grocery-anchored U.S. retail properties. (Remember how many times I’ve written on this blog about how grocery has one of the lowest online shopping penetrations?)
4) And the fourth: Slate is also starting a grocery-anchored retail platform in Germany. It is similar to #3, except that it’s in Germany.
Most recently, Slate has been in the news because of the position it has taken at Yonge + St Clair in midtown Toronto — a perfect example of “finding a home and taking long bets.” Slate, in partnership with Greystone, owns all 4 corners of the intersection and about 60% of the properties along the St. Clair corridor.
Here’s a diagram of those Slate buildings:
In case you didn’t put two and two together, the 8-storey mural I wrote about two weeks ago is going up (right now) on the side of a Slate building (1 St Clair Avenue West — shown above). The British street artist known as Phlegm is doing it.
Up until today, the focus of Slate has largely been on acquiring undervalued / overlooked real estate and creating value through re-leasing and overall repositioning. That will certainly continue. But given what I do, I am sure you can posit what’s also next.
I’m genuinely excited to be joining such a talented group of real estate professionals. As I mentioned last week, I wasn’t in the market for anything new. I was heads down working on cool projects. But life happens. And Slate quickly demonstrated to me that the incredible success they have seen to date is precisely because of how progressive, nimble, and entrepreneurial they are.
On that note, I have “one more thing” to share today.
In parallel to all of this, and with the support of Slate, I am also starting a boutique city building company called Globizen. The name is derived from Global + Citizen.
The objective is to build a company that embodies everything I write about on this blog. I want it to be lifestyle and design-driven. I want it to leverage technology to improve the way that cities and the building industry operate. And I want it to function as a vertically integrated real state + design firm, focused on sustainable urban infill development. Think of it as city building by and for the responsible global citizen.
It’s still early days, but the thinking is that this new platform could compliment the larger Slate platform in some way. It’s too early to say how exactly, but everyone is open to having those discussions. And that’s what matters at this stage.
I am going to end with a quote. It’s by Partner and Co-Founder, Blair Welch:
“On all of our deals we have had people say ‘can’t’ to us. They say ‘Can’t be done, can’t do that, can’t raise money, etcetera.’ At Slate, we don’t do ‘can’t’ well.”
I like that a lot. So here’s to finding a home, taking long bets, and not saying can’t. Onward my friends.
On that note, here’s what I have to tell you. Later this year I’ll be joining Slate Asset Management as VP of Development.
A bit about Slate:
Slate is one of the most active acquirers, owners, and managers of real estate in Canada right now. Founded in 2005 by two brothers (Blair and Brady), Slate has over $3 billion of assets under management across over 16 million square feet and over 130 properties.
All of this is done through four main investment vehicles:
1) The first is Slate Advisors. It acts on behalf of and alongside private institutional investors — such as Greystone.
2) The second is Slate Office REIT (TSE:SOT.UN). It is a pure play Canadian office REIT focused on downtown and suburban properties all across the country.
3) The third is Slate Retail REIT (TSX:SRT.U). It is a pure play REIT entirely focused on grocery-anchored U.S. retail properties. (Remember how many times I’ve written on this blog about how grocery has one of the lowest online shopping penetrations?)
4) And the fourth: Slate is also starting a grocery-anchored retail platform in Germany. It is similar to #3, except that it’s in Germany.
Most recently, Slate has been in the news because of the position it has taken at Yonge + St Clair in midtown Toronto — a perfect example of “finding a home and taking long bets.” Slate, in partnership with Greystone, owns all 4 corners of the intersection and about 60% of the properties along the St. Clair corridor.
Here’s a diagram of those Slate buildings:
In case you didn’t put two and two together, the 8-storey mural I wrote about two weeks ago is going up (right now) on the side of a Slate building (1 St Clair Avenue West — shown above). The British street artist known as Phlegm is doing it.
Up until today, the focus of Slate has largely been on acquiring undervalued / overlooked real estate and creating value through re-leasing and overall repositioning. That will certainly continue. But given what I do, I am sure you can posit what’s also next.
I’m genuinely excited to be joining such a talented group of real estate professionals. As I mentioned last week, I wasn’t in the market for anything new. I was heads down working on cool projects. But life happens. And Slate quickly demonstrated to me that the incredible success they have seen to date is precisely because of how progressive, nimble, and entrepreneurial they are.
On that note, I have “one more thing” to share today.
In parallel to all of this, and with the support of Slate, I am also starting a boutique city building company called Globizen. The name is derived from Global + Citizen.
The objective is to build a company that embodies everything I write about on this blog. I want it to be lifestyle and design-driven. I want it to leverage technology to improve the way that cities and the building industry operate. And I want it to function as a vertically integrated real state + design firm, focused on sustainable urban infill development. Think of it as city building by and for the responsible global citizen.
It’s still early days, but the thinking is that this new platform could compliment the larger Slate platform in some way. It’s too early to say how exactly, but everyone is open to having those discussions. And that’s what matters at this stage.
I am going to end with a quote. It’s by Partner and Co-Founder, Blair Welch:
“On all of our deals we have had people say ‘can’t’ to us. They say ‘Can’t be done, can’t do that, can’t raise money, etcetera.’ At Slate, we don’t do ‘can’t’ well.”
I like that a lot. So here’s to finding a home, taking long bets, and not saying can’t. Onward my friends.
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