Amy Wood

The pandemic helped ramp up data center usage, as businesses suddenly faced a greater need for cloud technology to connect and support remote workers. This increase in cloud migration has accelerated the growth and expansion of data centers globally, causing major data center operators to expand their footprints, according to a recent report from commercial real estate services firm Cushman & Wakefield (C&W).

“The reliance on technology platforms over last 24 months is at an all-time high, creating demand for more data center space across the world,” says Phoenix-based Carl Beardsley, senior director with JLL Capital Markets, who notes that the big operators and users are responding by building-out data space and turning it over at a high velocity.

Over the last year, U.S. users absorbed 500 megawatts (MW) of data space, says Dallas-based Bo Bond, executive managing director and leader of C&W’s global data centers team. The majority of that absorption was driven by “hyperscalers”—the largest occupiers of data centers, which are mostly cloud services firms including Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Microsoft.

JLL tracks both colocation absorption and hyperscale development activity, according to Beardsley. In terms of absorption activity in the colocation space, the top five or six U.S. markets typically see 70 to 80 percent of all activity, he notes. These markets include Northern Virginia, Phoenix, Chicago, Santa Clara, Calif., Dallas, and the Pacific Northwest.

These top markets are all seeing a significant amount of new development, but in recent years both Phoenix and Hillsboro, Ore. experienced an increase in colocation development because they offer competitive tax benefits, low-cost power, relatively low land costs, and a quick entitlement process, Beardsley says. These factors also are attracting public cloud users.

Datacenter developers are looking for additional capital to keep up with the added demand, and they aren’t disappointed, as data centers are currently among the hottest U.S. alternative real estate investment sectors, and a lot of investors are entering this market for the first time.

“Historically, data center capital markets were a mix of data center operators, infrastructure funds, data center REITs and investors that partner with preferred operators,” Beardsley notes. “Now, there is a large influx of institutional capital looking for higher-yield opportunities that performed well through the pandemic that is shifting attention from ‘core’ asset classes to this sector,” he says.

“There is a ton of money going into this sector,” adds Bond, noting other new entrants, including private equity funds, investment funds set up to specifically invest in data centers and sovereign wealth funds all have entered this market. There are also infrastructure funds that have switched from roads and bridges to data facilities and towers.

In fact, there is so much money going into big public data center REITs that they are consolidating and going private. Three of the largest data center REIT portfolio acquisitions ever occurred last year when CyrusOne, CoreSite Realty, and QTS Realty were taken private. For example, Blackstone acquired QTS for $10 billion.

A surge in user demand over the last six to 12 months for large blocks of space is driving new development, with some users even taking whole buildings of 250,000 sq. ft. or more, Beardsley says. In fact, demand for single-tenant data centers exceeds demand for multi-tenant space in some top markets like Northern Virginia, where 53 percent of users are seeking single-tenant centers.

“It can be difficult for users to forecast future IT loads, so these end users must ensure they are procuring enough space to continue to scale with business demands,” Beardsley says.

Demand for data center space is so strong that Beardsley notes the cloud services providers doing greenfield development are attracting institutional capital.

While hyperscalers lease a lot of data space from colocation operators, Bond says a huge acceleration in cloud-based services is also driving a surge in development by cloud companies. Beardsley notes that the top five hyperscalers are building out in primary markets, as well as areas not dominated by data center operators, such as Iowa, New Mexico, Nevada, and Ohio. “These hyperscale users typically buy large land parcels—300-plus acres—and build out a campus with multiple buildings,” he adds, noting that they often require additional resources that can be difficult to obtain at urban in-fill sites.

“As the use of cloud-based computing increases, hyperscalers will continue to build out in secondary and tertiary data center markets,” Beardsley says.

For example, Google Cloud plans to build new data centers in Nebraska, South Carolina, Virginia, Nevada, and Texas, according to an announcement made by Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai last May. Apple will also begin construction this year on a $1.3 billion data center in Waukee, Iowa that has been on its drawing board since 2017, reported KCCI Des Moines. And Meta (Facebook) is building a new $800-million data center near Kuna, Idaho, to support its future metaverse, reported Data Center Frontier.

AWS is building data centers in new markets around the world, but its biggest play is right here at home. The tech giant plans to spend $35 billion to build four data centers with more than 1 million sq. ft. on an 80-acre site adjacent to the Manassas mall in Prince William County in Northern Virginia, according to DCD News. The company’s data center revenue increased by nearly 40 percent year-over-year in the third quarter of 2021 to $16.1 billion,

And Microsoft has unveiled an aggressive plan to build 50 to 100 new data centers across the U.S. and around the globe each year for the foreseeable future, reported CRN, as it expands its Microsoft Azure cloud offerings worldwide.

Original article here.

Stonecrest Resorts, a commercial real estate development company, Monday announced phase two plans to turn the former Sears building in The Mall at Stonecrest into a family entertainment and lifestyle destination.

The $17 million adaptive reuse project will be called Priví and will feature a food hall with several entertainment concepts on the upper level and a health and wellness center, an event facility, and a full-service co-working space designed for creative industry professionals on the lower level.

Financing for the second phase of the project settled last week with pre-development already underway, according to Monday’s announcement. The project’s first phase of development was the opening of SeaQuest Interactive Aquarium in November 2021.

“We’ve already enhanced the Mall’s offerings with our financial investment in the opening of SeaQuest,” said Vaughn D. Irons, principal and developer of Stonecrest Resorts, in a press release. “We were able to accomplish both phases of development with private dollars and without asking the taxpayers to fund this project.”

The 15.1-acre parcel, which includes two buildings totaling 143,000 square feet, was purchased from the City of Stonecrest Urban Redevelopment Authority for $2.1 million in a sale that closed last October.

“This is the Stonecrest URA’s first development project and Stonecrest Resorts delivered upon their promises,” said Jazzmin Cobble, chair of the Stonecrest Urban Redevelopment Agency. “Our city government is looking forward to seeing additional attractions like this across the entire city that is both safe and mutually beneficial to all the residents and stakeholders of Stonecrest.”

The upcoming renovations will introduce new lifestyle elements to the mall under the brand name Priví, which is a play on the word privilege and the term privy.

“Privi is designed to be a one-of-a-kind culinary, entertainment, and tourism destination that will evolve into the new gathering place for the East Metro Atlanta Community and draw visitors from around the Southeast Region,” Irons, a Stonecrest resident since 2004, said. “We developed a project that responded to the community’s desire for elevated experiences, better dining options, and premier customer service,” he added.

The building is 85 percent leased and the full slate of tenants will be revealed in future announcements. The project is separated into five lifestyle components: a food hall, retail, health and wellness, and meeting and workspace.

A 50,000 square foot chef-driven food hall including healthy food and beverage concepts, as well as sit-down restaurants and cocktail bars, will be the centerpiece of the project. The food hall will be curated and operated by Good Food & Company’s Hospitality Group. Good Food & Company is well known in Atlanta for concepts such as the Atlanta Breakfast Club, ABC Chicken & Waffles, Atlanta Breakfast Club at the City of Refuge, and most recently Le Petit Marche. The executive chef and co-owner Chef Anthony Sanders and co-owner Osiris Ballard have developed unique concepts that feature cuisines with global influences.

“We’ve been quietly working on this for a year and as we became familiar with the demographics of East Metro Atlanta we embraced Stonecrest immediately,” said Ballard. We are going to bring some of our flagship restaurants combined with new chef-driven concepts and gourmet options.” Some of the food & beverage concepts coming to the food hall include Atlanta Breakfast Club, an upscale fine-dining restaurant, a hip-hop-themed karaoke concept, a rib and comedy joint, sushi, and a wine bar and market.

The experiential retail program will include a music and bookstore with a coffee shop and home goods. An upscale men’s and women’s clothing and shoe store bringing more cutting-edge fashion and bespoke clothing to the mall’s current offerings. The store will feature fashion designers and stylists instead of typical sales personnel. Planning is also underway to include a cigar emporium.

The health and wellness complex will feature nine resort-style establishments including a massage and facial day spa, an infrared sauna studio, a vitamin therapy medical institute, a mixed martial arts training and fitness center, oxygen and juice bar, a healthy food cafe, and a mental health and family therapy concept.

A creatives incubator workspace will provide opportunities for entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, digital content developers, and creative industry professionals such as filmmakers to accelerate their projects or business growth. The 18,000 square foot facility will include a co-working space with meeting rooms and private offices; studio space for photography, podcast, and digital media productions; and a 6,000 square foot multipurpose event & meeting space that will be the largest secular meeting venue in the area accommodating corporate training, weddings, banquets, and other entertainment events. The venue will provide support to the hotels immediately surrounding the mall and attract more activities in the Stonecrest sub-market.

Family entertainment offerings include SeaQuest, an ax-throwing concept, a comedy venue, an escape room, interactive golf simulators with a full slate of gaming options, a multimedia art studio that offers splatter painting sessions, art classes, and birthday parties.

Upon completion, the project will bring more than 560 jobs to the local economy and generate new taxes for the city of Stonecrest and DeKalb County by bringing the property back from exemption onto the tax rolls. It also will support the Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax (SPLOST) by attracting additional spending that creates an increase in sales taxes. Renovations are set to begin in spring 2022, with a planned opening of the lower level in summer 2022. The upper-level food hall will be complete by spring 2023.

As the healthcare industry evolves, more and more health and wellness providers are choosing to move into retail centers. These “medtail” tenants are driving much of the retail leasing activity right now, leading to a supply-demand imbalance in highly visible centers and allowing retail real estate owners to generate higher rental rates, particularly for end caps and outparcels.

As Americans pay more attention to preventative healthcare, providers are no longer focused exclusively on treating patients when they’re sick but also keeping them healthy. This increased emphasis on prevention and wellness has given rise to a wide range of tenants that find retail environments particularly attractive.

“Medtail tenants are really thriving today,” says Ryan Ash, project director with Vestar, a Phoenix-based shopping center owner, developer, and manager with a portfolio totaling 30 million sq. ft. throughout the western states. “We’re seeing a lot of interest from a combination of national brands and private operators have expressed interest in moving into our centers. We’ve been cutting a lot of deals over the past 18 months or so.”

Consider Vestar’s Queen Creek Marketplace in suburban Phoenix: the 900,000-sq.-ft. regional power center is home to several medtail tenants, including Alliance Urgent Care, Pacific Dental, The Joint Chiropractic, Prime IV Hydration & Wellness, and America’s Best Contacts.

Similarly, another Vestar property located in suburban Phoenix—Crossroads Towne Center—features several medtail tenants, including a primary care practice, East Valley Family Health, Crossroads Dental, and a new wellness concept called Cryoshift Cryotherapy.

“We are fans of medtail,” Ash says. “We think it’s a great complimentary use for our centers. As retail has changed over the years and become much more dynamic, we’ve seen that a combination of different uses creates an environment where all tenants thrive.”

More than urgent care centers and dentists

Though medtail is not a new concept, it is one that continues to evolve and expand. While urgent care providers, dental clinics, and vision centers were the first to realize the value of retail settings, other health, and wellness providers are now seeking out retail spaces. And with the closure of many retail and restaurant tenants due to the pandemic, medtail tenants have had an opportunity to lease retail space that wasn’t formerly available to them.

“They are looking for high visibility, high traffic shopping centers rather than the medical facilities,” says Ashley Casey, senior director of national accounts with Cincinnati-based Phillips Edison & Co. (PECO), one of the largest grocery-anchored center owners in the nation with a portfolio of nearly 290 shopping centers comprising roughly 30.4 million sq. ft. across 31 states.

The entire category of health and wellness is expanding to include more than traditional medical, dental and vision uses, Casey says. For example, alternative medicine and healthcare such as therapeutic massage, chiropractic medicine, and acupuncture are fast-growing medtail uses. Likewise, several cryotherapy operators and physical therapy operators have a marked preference for retail locations.

For example, PECO’s 2020 redevelopment of Murphy Marketplace in a far northern suburb of Dallas attracted several medtail tenants, including Restore Hyperwellness, America’s Best, Results Physiotherapy, and Total Men’s Primary Care. Casey says the new medtail tenants choose high visibility, easy access spaces and joined existing medtail tenants Sinai Urgent Care, MyEyeDr, Monarch Dental, and Dental One.

Cosmetic wellness—clinics focusing on skin and body treatments that require the oversight of a licensed physician—is also expanding at a rapid pace.

Positive contributors to shopping centers

Most retail real estate owners and developers consider medtail to be just as attractive, if not more so, than restaurants and service-oriented businesses such as dry cleaners and nail salons. “Owners are looking at medtail tenants a little more favorably because they’re mostly Internet-proof,” says Joe Miller, managing director and head of retail with JLL Valuation Advisory.

They’re not just Internet-proof, either. They’re “sticky” tenants too.

“Medtail tenants tend to sign longer-term leases because they have to invest a lot of money to get set up in a space, and they need time to establish their presence within a community,” Casey says. “That makes them attractive to owners and any other investors.”

In addition to serving as a differentiating tenant for a center, medtail tends to generate foot traffic and cross-shopping. Many medtail uses have tenant synergies with traditional retailers, says Brian Finnegan, executive vice president, and chief revenue officer for Brixmor Property Group. “For example, the wellness aspects of chiropractic, massage, and acupuncture are complementary to some of the athletic wear that an apparel operator may want to sell,” he notes.

Traditional retailers warm up to medtail

Historically, traditional retail tenants have been less than welcoming of medtail tenants. Traditional retailers, particularly those that served as center anchors, had not seen enough evidence to convince them that medtail tenants would benefit the center.

That’s why it is common for older anchor leases and national tenant leases to include restricted use clauses that prohibit medical-oriented tenants. In fact, that’s one of the biggest challenges that owners and landlords face when leasing space to a medtail tenant.

“We’re having to go through all these legacy national tenant leases and see whether or not we’re actually able to lease to medtail users,” Ash notes.

Traditional retail tenants are primarily concerned about two things: parking and cross-shopping. There’s a misperception that medical tenants are parking hogs and don’t have the ability to generate cross-shopping revenue like traditional retailers.

“The good news is that I think a lot of the national tenants that have these restrictive-use clauses are warming up to the idea that medtail has an overall net positive impact on a center and are granting waivers to landlords so we can lease to medtail tenants,” says Ash.

Some municipalities are also resistant to owners and developers leasing retail space to medtail tenants, according to JLL’s Miller. “I’ve seen municipalities push back on medtail because they’re not going to drive the same amount of sales tax that a retailer could,” he says.

Willing to pay for visibility

In the past, retail real estate owners and investors haven’t been on the same page with healthcare-focused tenants when it came to rental rates. More often than not, healthcare operators, whether they were primary care physicians or orthodontists, got a bit of sticker shock when they initially explored the idea of leasing space in a shopping center.

Instead of seeing the increased rent as a tradeoff for more visibility and the opportunity to expand their customer base and make it more resilient, these operators were focused on occupancy costs.

Ash acknowledges that health and wellness tenants pay a premium for retail space compared to most traditional medical office buildings. “But I think med tenants are recognizing that benefits are worth the additional cost,” he says.

Like many traditional retail and restaurant tenants, today’s medtail tenants want endcaps and outparcels. This supply-demand imbalance is creating a competitive leasing environment, according to Brixmor’s Finnegan.

Across the REIT’s shopping center portfolio, medtail tenants are among those that pay higher rents, Finnegan says. “We’ve seen a lot of demand for high profile locations with a lot of visibility, and health and wellness tenants have been willing to pay aggressive rents to secure the locations they want.”

Landlords that generate a portion of their revenue through percentage sales also give up that income when they lease to pure medical uses (e.g. urgent cares, dental clinics, and vision centers). However, most landlords can make up the difference by inking leases with medtail tenants at higher rental rates. Moreover, many medtail tenants have a higher quality credit profile than local or regional retailers and restaurant owners and are therefore considered less of a risk.

“Medtail tenants can provide a lot of upside for landlords,” Miller says.

Original Post Here.

Over the past several decades, science fiction movies have featured all kinds of things once thought unimaginable, such as robots, self-driving vehicles, and fully automated factories. As we reach a point where these fantasies have become a reality, the industrial real estate sector must look toward a smarter future. This article will discuss some innovative new features found in warehouses and what property owners can do to support them. 

What Does a Smart Warehouse Look Like? 

A “smart warehouse” is so-named because it relies on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) software solutions, which enable the identification and correction of inefficiencies. The COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing labor shortages caused warehouse operators to innovate new ways to pick orders and get them out the door with minimal staff, which significantly advanced the use of this type of warehouse technology. To keep pace with post-pandemic volumes, some of the solutions growing in popularity for the warehouse sector include: 

• Cobots and drones. Many warehouses have implemented robotic solutions to pick items. These advanced robots leverage AI, cameras, radio-frequency identification (RFID), barcode scanners, and other capabilities to identify items and bring them to a warehouse associate for convenient packing.
• Internet of Things (IoT). IoT solutions leverage an internet connection to maintain constant communication with warehouse systems, such as the warehouse management system (WMS), enabling continuous optimization. As a result, these systems can accomplish mundane tasks very fast while mitigating the risk of human error.
• Mobility solutions. Along with robotics and IoT solutions, e-commerce businesses are smartening up their warehouses using wearable technologies and mobile device solutions to keep associates connected with the WMS and automated equipment. These technologies augment the capabilities of each warehouse worker, enabling the facility to accomplish more with a smaller staff.
• Better analytics. Through advanced analytics capabilities, smart warehouse technology monitors order processing data and machine learning to predict ebbs and flows in order volumes with a high accuracy rate. This capability enables warehouse managers to optimize labor, space, and inventory levels continually.

Building the Warehouse of the Future Starts Now 

The days of dusty old warehouses have faded as a new era of online shopping and same-day shipping dominate the market. With online sales driving unprecedented growth in warehousing, property owners must keep pace with the evolving needs of modern warehouse tenants. Whether we’re talking million-square-foot mega-fulfillment centers or 10,000-square-foot micro-fulfillment centers, the e-commerce sector will seek the following to drive efficiency: 

• Excellent connectivity. Modern businesses have moved online. As a result, these companies aren’t hosting on-site legacy software in an internal server farm anymore. Instead, these businesses need advanced connectivity to support the simultaneous use of dozens of cloud-based softwares. To appeal to this new generation of tenants, landlords must get the warehouse wired for the highest possible internet speeds. Additionally, lessees will want reliable access to other advanced connectivity services, such as Wi-Fi 6, 5G, and SD-WAN.
• Sustainability. Studies have shown that most Americans engage in sustainable behaviors at home. With 64% of American shoppers willing to spend more on sustainable brands, e-commerce tenants will increasingly pursue opportunities to lease greener warehouses. Even if implementing sustainable changes makes the cost of leasing a warehouse slightly higher, tenants know they can pass some of that cost on to the consumer.
• Higher power capabilities. Automated solutions and the Internet of Things (IoT) draw significantly more power than traditional warehouses were built to handle. Property owners hoping to appeal to e-commerce tenants must ensure that their warehouses can handle the higher power requirements of more intelligent technology solutions. To the previous point about sustainability, ensuring that power comes from renewable sources will offer an added bonus.

With this infrastructure in place, e-commerce fulfillment operations and other tech-savvy industrial tenants can lease industrial space without worrying about the property’s ability to support future needs.  

Commercial real estate broker and developer Jay Gaudet’s biggest recent career breakthrough came from watching his daughter play Roblox. When she asked him for money to buy a virtual house on the popular global gaming platform earlier this year, it sent him down a research rabbit hole. 

“It was telling me everything that’s done in the physical world would need to be duplicated in the metaverse, and that spoke volumes to me,” Gaudet said. “Kids have been ahead of the adults for a while on this.”

Late last fall, 33-year-old Gaudet, who has 13 years of real estate experience in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, started his own firm, SuperWorld Realty, to focus on the metaverse, the nascent series of growing interactive virtual platforms that have been the subject of a real-life land rush in recent months.

Tantalizing tales of massive purchase and asset appreciation have inspired many firms, brokers, and speculators trying to find a way to get in on metaverse real estate — in which pieces of digital space are turned into nonfungible tokens and transferred like a deed — despite the technology and graphics of early virtual worlds lagging behind the hype.

DappRadar, a site that tracks NFT and virtual land sales, recorded $330M in trading volume in Q4 2021, and land on leading platforms such as Decentraland and the Sandbox traded at 150% and 500%, respectively, compared to purchases just a few months prior.

The profits have pushed many in commercial real estate to try and quickly grasp the fast-moving, high-priced market, which proponents claim is akin to investing in Manhattan land 250 years ago. Even established consultancies and investment firms such as McKinsey are issuing reports on metaverse investment potential and offering consulting services for top brands. 

But discussions with early leaders of the virtual land sector, while bullish about the market’s future, may dampen the enthusiasm among CRE pros who believe their skill set makes them natural candidates to manage virtual ownership and development. 

“Merely calling it real estate doesn’t make it real estate,” said Republic Realm CEO Janine Yorio, whose firm owns millions of dollars of virtual real estate spread across more than 3,000 plots of land on dozens of platforms like The Sandbox. “It’s software engineering. It’s buying a designated piece of code in what is effectively a very interactive video game-like web experience.”

The traditional vision of vertical development and construction needs to be cast aside, said Yorio, who has a background as a property developer for Standard Hotel Group.

“It’s the same way that game developers would be ill-suited to build Hudson Yards,” she said. The metaverse is more like “a hallucinogenic trip, as opposed to a thing where you take an elevator up through it and walk the floor. Why re-create the real world?”

Gaudet said his clients are looking for something slightly different. Gaudet’s firm works to provide investment advice, consulting, and services within SuperWorld, a platform that mimics the real world and allows participants to purchase virtual versions of real places. 

“This particular platform is going to be exactly for people like me, who work in this real estate space in the real world, and even people who don’t work in the space who want to understand how to buy physical real estate in a digital way,” he said. 

His work so far has been helping clients figure out ways to monetize the land they already purchased in the metaverse or figure out how to purchase a property they may have missed in the real world but could pick up in a virtual one. He said he is seeing people start with properties they are familiar with, places in their hometown or big cities, like the Brooklyn Bridge or the Superdome in New Orleans.

Despite Yorio’s proclamation, traditional investors are seeing potential in virtual ways to own existing buildings: Citi and UK investment group Abrdn are exploring ways to buy and sell tokens of existing properties.

“Right now in the virtual real estate space, you see a lot of people just are executing on FOMO,” Gaudet said, using the acronym for “fear of missing out.” “I want to be a part of it. I don’t necessarily know what I’m going to do with it afterward, but I want to jump into it.”

Yorio said investing in metaverse space is more parallel to art, entertainment, and retail, and she has rebuffed inquiries from investors in the built environment.

“We get calls from developers who want to build in the metaverse and feel like they’re going to make it legitimate,” she said. “It’s already legitimate, and nobody cares about your 50,000 apartments. There’s no place for them in the metaverse.” 

The value in a virtual world is being where brands and advertising are congregating, said Andrew Kiguel, the founder and CEO of Tokens.com, one of the larger property owners in Decentraland and other leading platforms. Kiguel is also a leading owner of Metaverse Group, a virtual real estate firm.

Brands are angling for a prime spot in the evolution of the attention economy and getting in front of a younger demographic immersed in gaming. To them, the metaverse is about billboards, not buildings. 

He compares the process to pre-buying advertising space on Facebook and Instagram that circulate through your social feed. Many of the housing and trophy residential projects are, to him, very speculative assets. Nobody needs your fancy virtual mansion, but there is enduring value in having the right ad placement for Gen Z consumers.

Right now, Kiguel’s firm is working on the Tokens.com Tower in Crypto Valley, set to include a convention center, a Bellagio-like fountain, and most importantly, lots of room for advertising.

Tokens.com will also help put on a massive virtual fashion event in the Fashion District of Decentraland, one of the larger metaverse platforms, where it happens to be the largest landlord. Tokens.com owns the virtual land where this is happening, and it will be renting it out to brands seeking to capitalize on the event. 

“I don’t think it can be disputed that the metaverse is a real thing that people are going to congregate in,” Kiguel said. “We’re just buying advertising blocks, and we now own a piece of the revenue generation of that community.”

Yorio would disagree. For her, there’s value in experiences. Her firm’s partnership with A-list New York City residential brokers Tal and Oren Alexander, a pioneering example of bringing real-world real estate talent to the metaverse, is about creating unique, artist-designed metaverse homes for high-end clients, she said.

The firm’s Fantasy Island collection of virtual villas in The Sandbox has tallied six-figure sales prices, and Republic Realm sold a $650K virtual yacht in November, paid for with cryptocurrency.  

“Why is Google more valuable than your mom’s website? Because more people visit and use it over and over and over again,” Yorio said. “Money is not the limiting factor. There’s lots of money in this space. It’s ability to deliver really complicated tech alongside a very holistic understanding of who the end-user is and why they would actually want to interact with your thing. This is immersive, interactive, and social.”

As the platforms, and the business case for virtual land buys, mature, it still remains to be seen just how much traditional real estate skills will matter in the metaverse.

Kiguel sees a future for traditional real estate expertise, mostly in the leasing end of the business. He is recruiting staff with the task of selling virtual storefronts and explaining the value of certain spaces and properties — many of the same skills one would encounter in the traditional real estate world, especially the storytelling skill. That is definitely not something Gaudet lacks. 

“We use the analogy of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, and where they started off with Amazon and Tesla,” said Gaudet of his pitch to investors. “If you invested in Amazon back in the ’90s, you knew four generations would be taken care of at this point.”

CoStar Group, Inc., the leading provider of commercial real estate information, analytics, and online marketplaces, today announced the CoStar Power Broker Quarterly Deals winners for the fourth quarter of 2021. Jack Hayes, CCIM, David Johnson, Rem Brady, Dave Jackson, and Shaun Roberts of NAI G2 Commercial Real Estate came out on top of the list of winners in Columbus, Georgia. The CoStar Power Brokers Quarterly Deals winners are determined by the top deals executed every quarter, based on price and square footage.

See the table below for a list of the deals recognized for this quarter.

Please help us congratulate Jack Hayes, David Johnson, Rem Brady, Dave Jackson, and Shaun Roberts on their CoStar Power Broker Quarterly Deals win for the fourth quarter of 2021 in Columbus, Georgia.

For more information, visit: https://www.costarpowerbrokers.com/quarterly-deals/

CATEGORY	ADDRESS	AGENT	TENANT
Retail	2019 Hwy 280 Bypass Phenix City, Georgia	Shaun Roberts Jack Hayes	Hostess Brands
Industrial	3000 Smith Road Fortson, Georgia	Jack Hayes, CCIM David Johnson Rem Brady Dave Jackson	Rogers Cartage Co
Office	1900 10th Avenue Columbus, Georgia	Jack Hayes, CCIM David Johnson	The Hughston Clinic
Retail	3812 Cusseta Road Columbus, Georgia	Jack Hayes, CCIM David Johnson	Carvana, LLC
Retail	3744 Woodruff Road Columbus, Georgia	Shaun Roberts	Uniforms for America