Features

By Jake Zwaagstra, CEO, TriCelta Development In many cases, the success or failure of a commercial development can boil down to one thing: trust. While stakeholders can be presented with a neatly packaged plan and broad estimates, a lack of clear breakdown of costs, data sources or reasoning behind key decisions can lead to confusion, second-guessing and sometimes, costly surprises down the line. Transparency is a fundamental quality in project planning, and it starts with an understanding of how every dollar is allocated, how risks are assessed and how the supporting data validates each recommendation. In order for stakeholders to function as confident decision-makers in the development process, transparency must guide the entire approach. When owners and their representatives provides visibility into costs, risks and long-term implications, they shift from passive collaborators into active, informed decision-makers. That sense of empowerment accelerates projects and builds resilience against the challenges of fluctuating markets and unpredictable environments. The Truth About Costs Today’s development landscape is anything but predictable. Across many markets, rising costs are reshaping the way projects are planned and delivered. Developers across the country are facing escalating expenses tied to materials and labor shortages, all while demand for housing and infrastructure continues …

By Ben Donsky, principal at Agora Partners Urban areas across the United States are increasingly facing the legacy of the physical and social divides created by existing highway infrastructure. For decades, elevated interstates have carved neighborhoods in half, often cleaving downtowns from their surrounding communities and draining the activity of urban cores. As cities experiment with ways to repair these divides and invite pedestrians back into the heart of civic centers, a new frontier in urban development is gaining momentum: the activation of under-highway spaces. We’ve seen how high-profile deck parks like Klyde Warren Park in Dallas, which this writer helped bring to life through thoughtful programming and activation, have captured the public imagination and inspired proposals like Atlanta’s HUB 404. But these initiatives can be ambitious undertakings that can require significant investment from both the public and private sectors, as well as long-term planning, to come to fruition. That can be especially challenging in today’s funding-constrained times. Confronting this reality, municipal leaders and city planners have started to recognize that the spaces beneath highways — formerly dismissed as trash-strewn, uninhabitable voids within cities — hold immense potential for fostering connectivity, establishing equity and increasing economic prosperity. At Agora Partners, …

By James Yoakum, attorney, Kleinbard LLC Many clients of commercial real estate attorneys are full-time, professional real estate investors who live and breathe cap rates, vacancy allowances, loan-to-value ratios and the latest hot adaptive reuse opportunities. However, another large portion of those clients are not real estate obsessives, but rather business owners across a variety of industries who see their real estate needs as just another expense item on the profit-and-loss statement — akin to payroll, utility bills and taxes. This writer also had a similar mix of real estate investor clients and “operating business” clients in his prior career on the brokerage side of the real estate world and has subsequently gained an appreciation for how both types of clients approach transactions. This article offers some key points for brokers, attorneys and other service providers to keep in mind when advising business owners and operators on their real estate needs, wherein operational priorities — rather than traditional real estate investment metrics — are typically key to structuring deals that work long-term. The Big Question: Own vs. Lease? Whether a business should own or lease the real estate that it operates out of is one of the biggest considerations for business …