Category: san francisco commercial real estate (137)

Source: CoStar
By: Diana Bell

Related Companies, one of the largest developers in New York City and a significant builder nationally, established an opportunity zone fund targeting $250 million in investments to become the latest investor to take advantage of the program designed to spark development.

The move signals that interest keeps growing among investors to stream capital toward opportunity zones, which are federally mandated swaths of land in economically depressed areas that carry tax breaks for commercial real estate investors.

“Nationally there has been a spike in investor interest and activity for opportunity zone properties,” said Darin Mellot, head of research for the Americas at commercial brokerage firm CBRE. “There is really nothing I am questioned about more, except when is the next recession.”

Related declined to comment to CoStar News with further information explaining the investment goals of the new fund, reported in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing last week, such as which markets it is targeting.

Related is not the only big name in commercial real estate to launch a fund under the federal Opportunity Zone program. Normandy Real Estate Partners has a $250 million fund, Starwood Capital and RXR Realty have each launched $500 million funds, and CIM Group has a $5 billion fund.

Created by Congress in 2017 as part of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the Opportunity Zone program encourages investments of at least five years in order to defer portions of capital gains taxes. For example, an investment of $10 million would, if sold after five years, be taxed on just $9 million. After seven years, the taxable amount would be $8.5 million. If held for at least 10 years and sold, gains would become tax-free.

“Opportunity zones are a generational type of incentive, not just for New York City but across the country. There are real advantages to be reaped with the program, and it’s no surprise that multiple institutional groups are rolling out funds. The investor pool for this strategy has expanded significantly,” said Victor Sozio, executive vice president in the investment sales group at commercial real estate services firm Ariel Property Advisors.

Of the 258 opportunity zone funds tracked by CoStar News, just over 33 percent plan to raise at least $100 million, and about 14 percent are targeting at least $250 million. Roughly 22 percent of the funds could be traced back to investors in New York and New Jersey, based on zip code. The 22 percent concentration combining New York and New Jersey outstrips the next-largest clusters of investors. About 8 percent of funds tracked hail from California, followed by 6 percent from Virginia.

New York state has a significant number of census tracts designated as opportunity zones, with 514. By comparison, California, a state three times the size of New York, has 879. There are 8,700 Opportunity Zones identified across the country.

New York City Investment

“In New York City, we’ve already seen increased activity in contract signings due to properties located in Opportunity Zones,” said Sozio, adding that his firm’s assignments under contract achieved 10 percent to 30 percent more in asking price because of stiff competition for Opportunity Zone investments.

But because of the cost to develop within New York City, neighborhoods in northern Manhattan and the Bronx are attracting a bulk of activity.

“The program is designed to incentivize development in depressed areas, but in New York City many of the areas that have been designated as Opportunity Zones are in areas that are already emerging markets, such as Mott Haven in the Bronx and Harlem, Washington Heights and Inwood in northern Manhattan,” Sozio said. “Inwood, for example, is benefiting from a double whammy of investor interest. It has been rezoned to allow more density and it is located in an Opportunity Zone. It is a neighborhood in Manhattan where pricing is still conducive to build rental buildings, and investors can also benefit from the Opportunity Zone structure. Inwood is a bit more attractive because you can buy land at $130 to $140 per buildable square foot.”

Manhattan has an Opportunity Zone in Hell’s Kitchen and one on the Lower East Side, but these areas below 96th Street prove challenging because their development sites have been trading based on condominium executions, noted Sozio.

“The program is not designed for a condominium developer because they don’t typically hold for 10 years. How do you secure a site that makes sense for a rental play in Manhattan? It is difficult because of pricing,” he said. “For parcels, you need to buy at $300 per buildable square foot in the Lower East Side to make it work … and sellers won’t sell because that is below market pricing. Those parcels are trading at $500 per buildable square foot.”

James Nelson, head of tri-state investment sales at commercial real estate services firm Avison Young, has predicted that 2019 will experience a 20 percent uptick in sales of development sites within the five boroughs of New York City because of opportunity zones.

“The investment possibilities that opportunity zones can provide in New York and around the country are huge to real estate and non-real estate investors. For real estate investors it is clear and intuitive. They look at the deal and invest. But for investors with non-real estate capital gains that cannot use a deferral program like 1031 exchanges, opportunity zones provide a great new avenue to accomplish a similar deferral with the possibility of back-end appreciation that they would not otherwise have,” explained Adam Sanders, an attorney specializing in investment transactions at law firm Rosenberg & Estis and its resident expert in opportunity zones.

Time Sensitivity

According to a 2019 real estate investment survey released by global business law firm Seyfarth Shaw, 32 percent of respondents said they will take advantage of the federal Opportunity Zone program as either an investor or a sponsor in 2019. Of that group, one-third are doing so to tap a new source of capital and a quarter are doing so to defer current taxable gains.

“Nationally the market is over a trillion dollars between capital gains of households and corporations, so there is significant capital moving into investment vehicles to take advantage of the capital gains savings,” said real estate adviser Greg Kraut, a managing partner of New York-based investment firm K Property Group and the CEO of bipartisan think tank Economic Policy Project.

One important caveat to opportunity zones is that they are time-sensitive. On December 31, 2026, a lump sum of taxes owed, based on hold times, are due.

“The tax benefits are time-sensitive, tax obligations are reduced more the longer you hold. You can only defer taxes for the period of time until 2026,” said Mellot. “Keep in mind that the IRS looks at two sets of gains, the original gain and the gain from the investment in the opportunity zone itself. There is no preferential tax treatment on the gain from the investment itself if you hold for 0-9 years.”

Facing an ever-dwindling timeline, the rush to invest nationally is being played out via pricing premiums on property trades.

“We are aware of some premiums being for paid for properties in opportunity zones, with some data showing a 5-percent to 10-percent premium on trades in select zones,” Mellot said of select zones nationally, but added he could not say for sure that finding is uniform.

Working It Out

But there is some uncertainty on key aspects of the Opportunity Zone framework, for which investors are still waiting on further guidance from the government. One significant area that has not been clarified is the federal government’s stance on refinancing an opportunity zone property. That would enable investors to recoup a bit of capital and would make it easier for smaller investors to play in the space.

“Certain ambiguities regarding technical details, such as whether that can be a distribution of proceeds during the hold period. If you can’t refinance and distribute proceeds during the hold, that doesn’t make much sense for investors. It especially puts smaller developers at a distinct disadvantage, because they don’t have the capital depth and scale to hold for a decade [compared to larger institutional investors.] Large funds have sufficient liquidity and scale to weather that,” noted Sozio.

A seminar scheduled for January to work out these kinks was canceled because of the government shutdown and investors are expecting additional guidance in the coming months.

One issue to watch, according to Kraut, is whether opportunity zones are artificially creating demand by forcing investment. Sanders said that the more complicated a transaction or development play, the more concern investors are showing until more guidance is released.

“For example, in New York City, a good amount of development is done on ground leases. Currently, New York views long term ground leases as real property but the IRS still has not confirmed that. This is holding up development on ground leases that want to utilize the OZ Program for investors,” he said.

Asked his perspective on pros and cons of opportunity zones, Sanders said, “Pros are that the Opportunity Zone program will provide an additional benefit for investors on deals that they were going to invest in already and potentially draw investors to deals for developments that are just on the edge of being viable. Cons are that some developers and investors are going forward without proper ongoing legal and accounting guidance.”

In light of the uncertainty, investors would be wise to step back from the fervor and scrutinize the merits of the investment strategy for a property or land parcel.

“Governors can designate up to 25 percent of their census tracts as opportunity zones, so there is a large volume of zones, but you still need to have an investment strategy. Sound investment principles still apply. Not all zones will make sense for investment. The OZ deals must have a market reason to make sense,” said Mellot.

“Investors should be cautious in these funds to make sure the underlying investment is viable, not just jump into it because it is located in an opportunity zone,” Sozio noted.

Link to article: Opportunity Zone

Calco Commercial has leased and sold 1,112,761+/- square feet of industrial, flex, office and land in 2018 comprising 66 transactions, with 20 transactions totalling 409,070+/- square feet in Q4 alone. Following are the notable Q4 2018 transactions: 30 Tanforan Avenue, S. San Francisco (215,539 +/- sf – industrial/lot lease), 695 Minnesota Street, San Franicsco (25,000+/- sf – warehouse/lease), 350 Harbor Way, S. San Francisco (24,600+/- sf warehouse/sublease), and 301 Toland Street, San Francisco (36,000+/- sf warehouse/lease). Calco Commercial is a leading industrial & commercial real estate firm with decades of experience in Landlord /Owner representation, and repositioning assets into net leased properties with in-place income streams. Let us help make the most of your real estate properties and investments.

Click here for the full Q4 San Francisco/Peninsula Industrial Market Report:

Source: CoStar
By: Randyl Drummer
Date: October 18, 2018
Link to article: ProLogis

Prologis, the world’s largest warehouse and logistics property company, has begun to consider its leasing options should space suddenly come available as a result of recent bankruptcies by retailers or the consequences of a trade war with China.

So far, San Francisco-based Prologis has yet to find any “measurable impact” from trade issues or retailer bankruptcies this year, Prologis Chief Executive Hamid Moghadam told investors during the company’s third-quarter earnings conference. In the latest sign of struggles among retailers, Sears Holdings Corp. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy this week and announced another 142 closings of Sears and Kmart stores.

“If we search real hard, we can point to one or two companies who backed out of lease negotiations in the U.S., but the impact of those isolated cases was negligible in the context of our overall leasing volume,” Moghadam said.

“I can think of 20 other reasons why tenants stopped negotiating or dropped out of a negotiation, and certainly the trade stuff has not yet in any way translated to any action on the ground that we can tell,” Moghadam added.

The company isn’t waiting for any trade war to start before monitoring possible effects on customers. Prologis is already making sure it’s aware of how long it would take to fill space should customers start vacating.

The fact that the largest company of its kind is concerned enough to seek signs of effects of tariffs and bankruptcies reflects the cautious nature of corporations at this point in the extended economic expansion since the recession.

The company has found that “there are plenty of other customers that are waiting in line for quality space and are frustrated by the shortage of suitable options,” Moghadam said.

The Trump Administration has levied tariffs on a total of $250 billion of imported goods from China, which has retaliated by announcing tariffs on $110 billion of U.S. exports.

About 25 percent of the most recent round of tariffs enacted in September is on consumer goods, unlike earlier announcements that mostly targeted materials and intermediate goods, according to Peterson Institute for International Economic, a Washington D.C.-based think tank.

Prologis has said that while a protracted trade war could increase the likelihood of a global downturn, about three-quarters of its U.S. customers are focused on local and regional business activity, including e-commerce delivery, rather than international trade.

Prologis now expects companies to take 260 million square feet of industrial space in the U.S. this year, 15 percent more than 2017, even as newly built space falls an estimated 10 million square feet short of tenant demand. As a result of the tight market, Prologis has been able to keep more than 80 percent of its tenants when their leases expire, despite imposing average rent hikes of more than 11.5 percent.

Not all companies in that industry can operate with that level of efficiency, meaning that Prologis could have a better chance of withstanding any downturn than smaller rivals.

“The markets are really strong and that’s why we’re getting these increases,” Moghadam said. “And not every discussion with every tenant starts out with the intention of them staying. In fact, many of them when they hear about the new rent get a little spooked.”

He said many tenants come back to Prologis and renew after shopping the market and failing to find lower rents.

Among the major commercial property types, only apartment and industrial real estate investment trusts have gained ground in their stock prices since the beginning of the year, according to National Association of Real Estate Investment Trust data.

Matt Kopsky, an analyst for Edward Jones, noted that about 30 percent of new Prologis leasing activity is related to space needed to fill online orders, with Amazon the company’s largest tenant at about 3 percent of total revenue from rents across its portfolio. The company also has demand from overseas to help insulate it from any downturn.

“Despite increasing competition from new construction and trade-tariff concerns, we think demand will remain robust,” Kopsky said. “Increased global trade is also a significant factor, particularly overseas, since Prologis leases space to third-party logistics firms providing warehouse and distribution to multinational corporations.”

According to Bisnow, “tech and life sciences companies made up 67.1% of total office leasing activity in Silicon Valley and 64.6% in San Francisco for 2017 through midyear 2018.” With nearly daily headlines of Facebook and other tech giants snapping up huge swaths of space in San Francisco and its surrounds, it is no surprise that the Bay Area’s tech leasing activity is approximately 40% higher than the nation.

Tech, media, and e-commerce firms, both large and small, understand that in order to be competitive and attract talent, they need a physical presence in the Bay Area. San Francisco Bay Area continues to hold the title for most tech jobs in the United States. Real estate professionals project that tech will continue to expand in Silicon Valley, although solutions to issues such as affordable housing/cost of living will need to be explored to retain the skilled labor force necessary for start-ups and big tech.

Source: Costar
By: Randyl Drummer
Link: Starwood Capital

Investment firm Starwood Capital Group has sold 33 prime office properties totaling 3.3 million square feet in San Diego; Portland, Oregon; and Raleigh, North Carolina, to a Singapore-based developer in its first foray into U.S. real estate investment, according to sources familiar with the deal.

Starwood Capital had been quietly shopping the portfolio with New York brokerage Eastdil Secured and accepted an offer from Ascendas-Singbridge Group, a developer and investor jointly owned by Singapore state-owned real estate companies Temasek Holdings and JTC Corp., said the sources, who are not authorized to publicly discuss the transaction.

In a brief release that did not mention Starwood, Ascendas-Singbridge said Friday it plans to expand within the U.S. and is opening an office in San Francisco to provide support for asset management, business development and other related services.

Ascendas-Singbridge manages more than $14.6 billion in global assets, predominantly in Asia and Australia. According to its website, Miguel Ko, the current executive director and group chief executive of Ascendas-Singbridge, is the former chairman and president of Starwood Hotels & Resorts, Asia Pacific Division.

The discussions come as the group and parent company Temasek also aim to buy into the lucrative North American shared workspace market as part of a $45 million investment in Breather, a flexible workspace provider.

Sources in Los Angeles, San Diego and Portland said the portfolio includes most of Starwood Capital’s office holdings in San Diego and the Portland suburb of Beaverton, Oregon, plus properties in North Carolina.

The portfolio includes a heavy concentration of office and flex properties in the Rancho Bernardo and Sorrento Mesa areas of San Diego, home to many technology and life science companies, a source said.

Starwood acquired 12 San Diego buildings in 2014 totaling more than 1 million square feet in Rancho Bernardo and Sorrento Mesa from Los Angeles-based developer Kilroy Realty Corp. for $295 million, according to CoStar data. The properties, mostly built between 2000 and 2006, include six office buildings and a flex building at an office park in Rancho Bernardo known as Innovation Corporate Center, a source said.

The San Diego properties being sold also include the three-story, 318,000-square-foot Pacific Corporate Center at 10020 Pacific Mesa Blvd., occupied by medical device maker Becton, Dickinson and Co., and several buildings at Sorrento Mesa’s The Campus at Sorrento Gateway, the source said.

The bulk of Starwood’s current Portland portfolio is comprised of office and flex buildings in Beaverton acquired from Glendale, California-based PS Business Parks Inc. Starwood purchased 25 low-rise buildings, ranging from 16,500 to 65,500 square feet each from PS in October 2014 for $164.1 million, according to CoStar data. Most were built in the 1980s and 1990s.

Eastdil and Ascendas-Singbridge did not immediately return calls or emails requesting comment on the transaction. Starwood Capital didn’t immediately comment.

The portfolio purchase is the first major real estate investment in North America for Ascendas-Singbridge, which has properties in 28 cities in Australia, China, India, Indonesia, Singapore and South Korea. The group, under its subsidiary Ascendas, manages three Singapore exchange-listed funds, including Ascendas Real Estate Investment Trust, Ascendas India Trust and Ascendas Hospitality Trust. Ascendas-Singbridge also manages several private real estate funds.

Ascendas REIT just last month announced its first push beyond Australia and Asia into Europe, which includes a plan to buy 12 logistics properties in the United Kingdom. Ascendas-Singbridge Group Chief Investment Officer He Jihong said in a statement the move “fits well with Ascendas-Singbridge Group’s plans to widen our international presence.”

Ascendas-Singbridge and Temasek are also aiming to indirectly enter the shared workspace business through their investment in Breather, a flexible workspace provider specializing in leases of less than a year. Breather, launched in Montreal by entrepreneurs Caterina Rizzi and Julien Smith in 2013, announced in June it had raised $45 million from Ascendas-Singbridge, Temasek, Menlo Ventures, Canadian pension fund Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, and others to expand into more markets and provide “longer duration bookings.”

Source: CoStar
By: John Doherty
Link: Amazon HQ2

After Amazon gave his county a painful snub in January, David Iannucci is stuck exactly where 19 communities may find themselves in coming months: trying to market sites that online retailer Amazon rejected for its new $5 billion second headquarters.

Iannucci, head of economic development for Maryland’s Prince George’s County, said he’s been in talks with “several dozen” companies since the world’s largest retailer rejected the county’s bid for its second headquarters, known as HQ2. Many of those companies are looking to move from nearby Washington, D.C., including tech and cybersecurity firms. Those companies aren’t promising to bring 50,000 jobs, like Amazon, though. More like 300 to 400 apiece. And here’s the real peril for other losing cities: After eight months, Iannucci still has no takers, just talkers.

Even so, he said the process has improved the county’s pitch in those talks: “This process reinforced our knowledge of our strengths. We see that there are things we could focus on and promote. That won’t stop.”

For cities from Boston to Atlanta, the effort to woo Amazon has led officials to come up with development plans for long-fallow areas they can quickly turn around and pitch as facility sites for other companies if they meet the same fate. In Newark and Denver, officials say they are positioned to attract other companies should Amazon reject them, Atlanta’s mayor is urging steps that could position the city to find other companies after a rejection, and Boston already has an alternative in place.

To a greater and lesser extent, the 20 finalist cities are beginning to grapple with an irrefutable truth: All but one will lose this commercial real estate beauty pageant. Most of the sites proposed as HQ2 homes are too large to quickly market to another company other than Seattle-based Amazon because the list of U.S. corporations needing that kind of space can be counted on one hand.

In some cases, the process of applying itself was edifying: Officials in finalist cities Newark and Denver both say the process raised their profile as legitimate hosts for corporate headquarters. They hope that could pay off down the line, even if Amazon passes them over.

“There is a lot of excitement in the development world about the possibilities for Amazon,” said Richard Dunn. He’s vice president of operations at Paramount Assets, an investment firm that owns about 40 properties in downtown Newark.

“Even making that list of the 20 basically tells the tale about the resurgence of Newark,” he says. “Now if Newark wasn’t in a resurgence stage, if it wasn’t for its renaissance, obviously Amazon wouldn’t be looking at Newark.”

Whether or not Amazon picks it, the proposal process has elevated the city’s profile not only nationally but internationally in a tangible way, local officials said, and they intend to build on that momentum.

“We’ve seen a huge uptick in the number of inquiries that are coming into our office,” said Aisha Glover, president and chief executive of the Newark Community Economic Development Council. “And then, just kind of anecdotally speaking to brokers around the city, they’ve been saying how the quality of the inquiries has changed. For them, the uptick in inquiries hasn’t been so dramatic, but the types of firms that been inquiring with them.”

The same goes for Denver. Sam Bailey, who, as vice president of the Metro Denver Economic Development Corp., is managing the state’s bid for Amazon’s second headquarters. He said there’s now a burgeoning pipeline of 31 active prospects for space that represents more than 12,000 jobs and about $1.5 billion in capital expenditures from entrepreneurs to Fortune 500 companies. Denver winning a spot on Amazon’s short list has been noted about 30 percent to 40 percent of the time in those discussions, Bailey said.

“We always looked at this as if we don’t win HQ2, we’re going to make the most of this opportunity to showcase to the world everything that is going on in our region,” Bailey said. It will put Denver on the minds of future executives looking for new corporate digs, he said. “The experience, the notoriety, the visibility – we could’ve spent millions of dollars and never have gotten the exposure we’ve had,” Bailey added.

Other finalists aren’t so sure. Austin, Texas, another member of the 20-region shortlist, has endured a long local debate about what inviting the corporate giant into their city might do to it: raise rents, increase traffic, mess up the balance of the artsy city’s culture.

“I don’t know that we want to be” Amazon’s second home, Austin Mayor Steve Adler admitted this past March.

A poll conducted by Elon University and American City Business Journals found 13 percent of Austin locals don’t want their city to host Amazon’s second headquarters, second only to Denver, at a whopping 17 percent.

The full details of what Austin has offered to Amazon are between the city and the online retail giant, but if the mayor’s comments are any indication, Amazon was left wanting. On the day of Amazon’s shortlist announcement, Austin Mayor Steve Adler reiterated the reluctance of city leaders to extend tax breaks and other incentives in order to lure Amazon HQ2.

In other cases, the competition itself sparked questions about economic development. How far was a city willing to go to land a whale like Amazon: Would it offer free land, reduced taxes or no taxes?

Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms last month urged the City Council to support proposed incentives to make a site leaders see as critical to downtown Atlanta more appealing to developers.

Known as the Gulch, the site is a former railyard that covers 30 football fields worth of land near CNN Center and Mercedes-Benz Stadium, and has lain fallow for decades. While the city hasn’t officially confirmed it is the site for its bid for Amazon’s headquarters, several council members said they believe the incentives push is designed to help in the city’s bid to land HQ2.

With or without Amazon, Bottoms said the city has a “once in a lifetime” opportunity to redevelop the Gulch and stressed that developer CIM would assume all financial risks of the $3.5 billion development. She added that the redevelopment of the Gulch “will ultimately generate tens of millions of dollars a year in tax revenues” and create thousands of jobs. The mayor’s push for incentives so late in the Amazon selection process would leave the city in a stronger position to find alternative companies to occupy the site should it not be selected as home to HQ2, city leaders said.

Other cities are also not making the HQ2 battle their only priority.

In Boston, the primary site for a possible new headquarters is at Suffolk Downs, a 161-acre former horse-racing track that straddles Boston and the northern suburb of Revere. Long under-used, the site has been the subject of several redevelopment efforts over the years.

In 2017, Boston investment firm HYM Investments paid $155 million for the site. It was offered up as an HQ2 contender, but some preliminary plans have also called for a massive mixed-use project with apartments, for-sale homes and office and retail space.

Whatever happens, according to HYM, the firm will keep shopping the site.

That day-after thinking is starting to pervade most planners in HQ2 finalist cities. And Iannucci, of Prince George’s County, thinks that’s the right attitude.

His bid didn’t make it, but bids in nearby Washington, D.C., Montgomery County, Maryland and Northern Virginia did. Any of those sites, if picked, could have a spill-over effect – jobs, housing demand – for Prince George’s.

“We stand by ready to help [those finalists] any way we can,” he says.

Still, as 19 other cities will discover it hurts to be told no.

“Amazon was wrong about their conclusion about our workforce,” said Iannucci, a former Maryland state Secretary of Commerce. “We have feelings about that to this day.”

Contributing to this article are CoStar News Reporters Kyle Hagerty, Linda Moss, Jennifer Waters and Tony Wilbert.

According to the The Registry and the San Francisco Business Times, Amazon’s real estate presence in San Francisco continues to grow by nearly doubling its leased area at the 525 Market Street building.

Amazon currently leases approximately 176,000 square feet in San Francisco’s third largest office building, where the e-commerce leader will be expanding into an additional 143,000 square feet. Per The Registry article, “Amazon has been actively expanding its presence across the entire Bay Area region” as the company continues its search for the secondary HQ location.

Amazon’s pending purchase of online pharmacy PillPack has the potential to create a need for specialized warehouse space to ship prescription drugs and even lead to small retail clinics, adding demand to an already surging industrial property market.

The move by the online retailer could have significant implications for industrial property sales, which outperformed other major commercial sectors across the U.S. in the second quarter as Amazon and other companies pump up their supply chains for e-commerce delivery, according to CoStar data.

“If you really read between the lines here, and kind of analyze this, Amazon wants to be part of every single transaction that happens in our lives,” said Gregory Healy, senior vice president of chain and logistics at Colliers International.

Amazon, the world’s largest retailer, bought PillPack in late June for an estimated $1 billion. PillPack holds pharmacy licenses in all 50 states and ships medications from its primary drug distribution center in Manchester, NH, to customers who take multiple daily prescriptions. The company is targeting a major market: On its website, PillPack says 40 million adults take more than five prescriptions each day.

If Amazon incorporates PillPack’s approximately 1 million customers into its Prime membership business, which has 100 million subscribers, the company would need drug distribution centers near large cities cleared to handle medicines, said Santo Leo, founder and CEO of MailMyPrescriptions.com in Boca Raton, FL.

Those could be small centers dotted across the country or a handful of larger ones. In either case, they will have to meet far more specialized state and federal requirements because the goods being handled are medicine, Leo said.

Though Amazon already owns or leases about 100 million square feet of distribution space, “you can’t just rip a warehouse out and put a pharmacy there,” said Leo, whose mail-order pharmacy is licensed to dispense prescription drugs in more than 40 states. “You need to design these from scratch. You need more power, more data, more security measures. Traditional big, bulky, automated facilities are just not designed for pharmaceuticals.”

Pharmaceutical warehouses must have processes in place for temperature control, security, documentation and the ability to address product recalls, said Carmine Catizone, executive director of the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy, which accredits wholesale pharmaceutical warehouses. Each state also has different licensing requirements.

The company may need new buildings for an online pharmacy, the analysts said. Though Amazon is opening fulfillment centers at a dizzying rate — eight so far in 2018 — it has a host of controls to ensure each center operates at maximum capacity and has little extra space, the company said in its 2017 annual report.

Amazon declined to comment on its plans for specialized PillPack warehouse space. Amazon hasn’t made any public statements about its PillPack strategy since shortly after the purchase, which is expected to close by the end of the year.

Amazon’s PillPack purchase follows its joint venture with Berkshire Hathaway Inc. and JPMorgan Chase to improve the U.S. health care system and cut costs. PillPack is part of that strategy, said Leo, who predicted Amazon would move quickly to grow PillPack to place pressure on health-care competitors.

“How do you keep people out of the doctor’s office or hospital lab? Make sure people take their prescriptions,” he said.

Healy said the purchase could have implications for any brick-and-mortar plans Amazon has as well, noting the trend toward small, walk-in clinics across the country. It’s estimated there are now almost 3,000 such clinics, according to Accenture. He also speculated that Amazon could add pharmacy services to its Whole Foods stores.

“It will probably net a greater industrial space for Amazon, but I would think there would be some sort of new retail model,” he said. “There could be something else down the pipeline, perhaps a new form of retail.”

Source: CoStar News
By: Rob Smith
Date: August 2, 2018
Link: Amazon

Source: San Francisco Chronicle
By: Roland Li
Date: July 26, 2018

Facebook’s recent share plunge was one for the stock-books as the $119 billion decrease officially became the largest drop on Wall Street, even surpassing Intel’s $90 billion one-day drop in 2000. Facebook is one of the Bay Area’s largest employers and drives a local economies–what does this severe decrease in stock value mean for the Bay? According to the The Chronicle, the plunge will not “hurt the Bay Area economy.” Coupled with their “$42.3 billion cash reserve,” and with a planned 20,000+/- jobs being added to the security team, Facebook will continue to “boost the local economy.”

Other economists worry that the drop in price could indicate a pending correction in the market. However, with Amazon’s massive increase in Q2 earnings, it may be too early to predict if Facebook is suffering from an overall market dip, or its own public relation woes.

According to Gary Schlossberg, a senior economist at Wells Fargo and quoted in the Chronicle article, the market has experienced a “mild deterioration in some of the fundamentals driving the market. The question is: how much will U.S. growth slow and with it earnings growth? A lot of strength in earnings has to do with corporate tax cuts. We need to see how aggressively the Fed will move interest rates. There could be a gradual turn toward ad less friendly environment for the stock market.”

Time will tell.