Brookfield has $106B to deploy.

• Brookfield Asset Management has raised $8B for its flagship real estate fund so far, including $2.2B in Q1 2024, and is still open for additional capital commitments.
  

• Connor Teskey, BAM’s President, says that investors are “seeing the upside and the rebound in that asset class” and “this is where we’re really seeing the market opening up”.
  

• Now that BAM’s profit has dropped by 14.5% to $441M YoY in Q1, the company acknowledges that CRE opportunities are on the way, especially among over-leveraged and/or underperforming assets.
  

• Nonetheless, BAM’s largest transactions during Q1 were sales, such as its 49% stake in ICD Brookfield Place in DIFC (Dubai’s financial center), which got acquired by a Saudi conglomerate.
  

• Bruce Flatt, Brookfield’s CEO, said investors are mostly interested in prime assets, leaving Class-B and Class-C assets behind.
  

• Click on the button below to read the full story from Bisnow.

🏬 Retail News

• According to The Real Deal and the WSJ, e-commerce is boosting physical stores, not threatening them, as 42% of online orders involved stores, up 15 percentage points from 2016.
  

• Dunn Brothers Coffee, born in Minneapolis, plans to open 250 stores within 5 years, expanding its current 50-location portfolio.
  

• Odyssey Retail Advisors says “Luxury retail is thriving” in NYC, Chicago and South Florida, as U.S. luxury spending soars despite inflation.

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🏭 Industrial News

• Amazon has started leasing 6 additional properties over 1M SF since the beginning of 2024, as much as in all of 2023, and they are likely to continue, while they are closing smaller locations.
  

• Blackstone sells a huge, $246M, industrial portfolio in NYC, as demand for Class A industrial space slows.
  

• Industrial developers are slowing down activity in Los Angeles, as vacancy rates are much higher than during Covid.

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🏘️ Multifamily News

• Manhattan apartment rents hit their highest record, with an average sitting at $5,089/month.
  

• As student housing keeps growing at record-speed, these are the Top 5 markets for future construction, according to Multi-Housing News.
  

• The affordability gap went insane, now sitting at $1,300 on average, with only 25% of people able to qualify for a mortgage in their market, benefiting the multifamily asset class.

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🏢 Office News

• South Florida leads the U.S. with the highest office attendance rate, at just 14% off 2019, compared with 32.2% nation-wide.
  

• Google is moving out of One Market Plaza, on SF’s waterfront, leaving 300k SF of unoccupied space behind in this 1.6M sq. ft. trophy asset.
  

• Stiles and Shorenstein JV opens a $186m office tower in Charlotte, NC, where office vacancy sits at just 14.5%, below the national average.

Year-over-Year transactions are down just 8.00% in Q1 2024, up from -18.4% in Q4 2023 and record-low -55.1% in Q2 2023.

Nonetheless, two very large transactions in NYC ($2B and $1.5B respectively) have considerably affected those figures.