Editors' Choice: The Very Best Bisnow Stories Of 2022
In July, we tragically lost Bisnow CEO Will Friend, who among many other things, was a champion of this newsroom and one of its chief visionaries in the early days of the company.
Bisnow didn’t always produce “serious news,” as he would say, but it was a dream of his to imprint journalistic values on our business. He wanted the publication to be taken more seriously and his vision was simple: If Bisnow produced fairly reported hard news then more people would read it and if more people read it then Bisnow would become a more valuable company for the industry.
So, when Will took over Bisnow in 2015 when he was just 27 years old, he did it.
Together, he and I built a wall between editorial and sales (separation of church and state, as it's called) and I am proud to say that during his tenure he saw the newsroom become a force to be reckoned with — racking up journalism awards, dramatically expanding its audience, and achieving credibility and relevance in the most elite power circles of global commercial real estate.
None of it was easy. In the years that followed, every now and then I would get a text message from Will that included a link to a Bisnow story or a competitor. Then I would see the typing bubble bubbling away on my phone and brace myself.
Was this going to be an attaboy? A criticism? Is an advertiser upset?
“THIS IS AWESOME!” he might write or “Nailed it” or even better, “Love it when we’re first.” Those sentiments always felt good and he sent them often, but occasionally he would send something spasm-inducing: “Are you sure about this one?” We had more than a few of those over the years, too.
Obviously, sometimes our reporters and editors didn’t have a story first or at all, sometimes we did upset an advertiser, sometimes we messed up the facts of a story and sometimes we needed to issue a correction. When Will would talk to me about stories that ruffled feathers it always brought us back to our original pact to pursue hard news that did not kowtow to any sponsor and showed no fear or favor to anyone or any entity — ever.
But as I said over the summer in the wake of his death, Will never buckled.
I have never worked with someone, who wasn’t a journalist, who was so strongly committed to hard news and repeatedly had the discipline to not intervene, especially when the stakes were at their highest. It took incredible courage on his part to trust the team he built and I will forever be grateful. He was the greatest partner someone like me could ever have.
I don’t get text messages from Will anymore, but if I did he likely would have been most proud of these stories from 2022 — the deep dives that really mattered, the big ones you might have missed and the painstaking journalism he would have hoped would enhance your perspective of the world CRE continues to shape.
Sincerely,
Mark F. Bonner, Editor-in-Chief
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MARK BONNER, Editor-In-Chief |
Bisnow's 2022 DEI Data Series
By Jon Banister, Bianca Barragán, Joseph Gordon, Miriam Hall, Olivia Lueckemeyer and Dees Stribling
Since the fractious summer of 2020, some difficult DEI questions still hang over the commercial real estate industry: What is the industry doing to diversify its ranks? What companies are getting it right and which are not? Why does the industry that decides how all the modern world lives and works not reflect how the world looks — and why does that matter?
In the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the subsequent protests, the Bisnow newsroom asked those questions of the multitrillion-dollar U.S. commercial real estate industry and committed itself to a protracted effort to shine a light on racial and gender inequality at the highest ranks of the industry.
Three years later, we’re still asking these questions, and much more, in what has become our annual Bisnow DEI Data Series, an award-winning investigative project that has amassed a unique cache of data that continues to examine the diversity of the boards and executive leadership of the biggest companies in real estate.
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CATIE DIXON, Managing Editor |
As Wall Street Nudges The Nation Toward Rentership, Community Resentment And Pushback Are Building
By Olivia Lueckemeyer, Lane Gillespie and Jarred Schenke
The rise of single-family rentals as an institutional investment class could have a large impact on society. But will that impact be more positive or more negative?
Olivia Lueckemeyer, Jarred Schenke and Lane Gillespie deftly teased out the nuance from various sides: unhappy renters who say Wall Street landlords don’t care and raise rents unreasonably, SFR developers who say this product is an important tool to tackle the housing crisis and affordability, and NIMBYists who fear SFR could change the tenor of existing neighborhoods.
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As The Wealthy Return To Cities, Beach Resort Towns Are Left With A Housing Mess
By Miriam Hall, New York City Reporter
Much digital ink has been spilled since the beginning of the pandemic on the migration of people from big cities to areas with more space and more natural resources. But when data started to show people were returning to the major metros, fewer articles looked back at what those pandemic migrants left behind.
Miriam Hall spoke to longtime residents of the Hamptons to understand the problems — especially housing affordability and labor shortages but also strains on public services and quality of life — that came with a wave of wealthy urbanites crashing into tony Long Island beachside towns and then receding.
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ETHAN ROTHSTEIN, DEPUTY MANAGING EDITOR |
Biden's 100,000-Refugee Pledge Faces Hurdles Amid U.S. Housing Shortage
By Jon Banister, Deputy East Coast Editor
It’s not every day that Bisnow writes a story that makes a direct impact on people’s safety and security, but that is what happened this year when Jon Banister started covering the issue of refugee housing. The United States opened its arms to nearly 100,000 refugees fleeing strife and war in Afghanistan and Ukraine, but those working to resettle those refugees warned that the nation’s housing crisis could lead to an even bigger domestic crisis.
A big hurdle emerged in the form of landlords who wouldn’t waive credit or background checks for prospective tenants. Those that leased homes to refugees found them to be hardworking, model tenants, but resettlement organizations told Jon in March that the places taking in refugees were “tapped out.”
After Jon’s March story, he heard from several landlords across the country who said they wanted to help and connected them with the resettlement groups. When he did a follow-up story in September, we were pleasantly stunned by what his new reporting revealed: Landlords had softened their stances and welcomed refugees into their properties in far greater numbers than before. As a result, 98% of the 80,000 Afghani refugees in the U.S. were placed into housing this year.
Read the full story from March here and the follow-up in September here.
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A Newly Public Company Wants To Shake Up The Hotel Industry. Customers Say It’s A Scam
By Ciara Long, New York City Reporter
When CorpHousing Group announced it was master-leasing large hotels in New York City and D.C., it caught our attention. But nothing could have prepared us for what Ciara Long discovered under the surface: a company with less than $600 of cash on hand, a trail of lawsuits for not paying vendors and employees, and dozens of customers who said they were charged for rooms they never stayed in. Ciara’s reporting was thorough enough that after weeks of ignoring outreach, CorpHousing Group’s executives sat down with us for a 90-minute-long interview.
In the time between that interview — in which Ciara and I asked about the company’s hotel management experience and its branding as a corporate housing provider, as well as the firm’s financial questions and customer complaints — and when the story published, the company changed its name to LuxUrban Hotels, hired a third-party management firm for its New York hotels and started to sideline its president, the only person at the company who purportedly had any hotel industry experience. That executive, who we learned also ran a nonprofit defending people convicted of war crimes, was officially removed from his executive position at the company this month.
While LuxUrban is still relatively small, it is still growing fast, taking over hotels that have gone bankrupt or otherwise closed. It has its sights set on becoming a major player in the hotel industry. Because of Ciara’s reporting, its future business partners and customers have a much better idea of whose bed they are getting into.
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KATHARINE CARLON, Central U.S. Editor |
Amazon Crushes Building Materials Supply Chain, Sends Shockwaves Through Construction Industry
By Olivia Lueckemeyer, Dallas-Fort Worth Reporter
Working off a one-sentence aside made by a panelist at a Bisnow event, Olivia Lueckemeyer realized immediately that a crippling supply chain crisis in the construction industry was being exacerbated by Amazon’s voracious need for building materials. Though the e-commerce giant has since reversed course on building new facilities, she made a compelling case Amazon was cornering the market on everything from steel joist and deck materials to concrete, leaving everyone else fighting for scraps. Our readers agreed, making this story one of Bisnow’s most-read in 2022.
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Two Years Of Pandemic Changed Everything For Women In CRE
By Miriam Hall, Olivia Lueckemeyer and Bianca Barragán
The disruption in work patterns brought on by the pandemic gave some women newfound freedom to advance, pursue new avenues and win long-sought-after change and flexibility in the workplace.
But for too many, the crisis was more a case of plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Women who spent years clawing their way up in a traditionally male-dominated industry saw gains slip away as they juggled childcare responsibilities and home-schooling amid widespread closures, lost out on important facetime — and promotions — in the office, and struggled to win new business. Some left the industry entirely out of frustration. Others, especially women of color and those who had faced aggression from men in the workplace, found hybrid and remote work to be a reprieve, with one woman dryly questioning “What’s wrong with our industry if women are faring better during a devastating pandemic that's going to set women back in the workplace a generation?”
In the lead-up to the two-year anniversary of the pandemic’s onset, Olivia Lueckemeyer, Bianca Barragán and Miriam Hall spent several months speaking to more than two dozen CRE professionals to illustrate through powerful personal stories just how the virus invaded their lives.
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MOLLY ARMBRISTER, West Coast Editor |
Facing $1T Shortfall, Pensions Scale Up Real Estate Investments In Search Of Returns
By Bianca Barragán, Southern California Reporter
Stories always start with questions, and like scientists, journalists often have a hypothesis in mind when they set out to report a story. But in the course of reporting, of asking questions and following where the answers lead us, we often end up with a different conclusion than we anticipated. That is precisely what happened when Bianca Barragán set out to examine how pension funds — some of the biggest investors in commercial real estate — are changing their strategies in the midst of historic funding shortfalls and a generational shift in the way office properties are used, and therefore, how they’re valued. What she found was that in the face of a $1T gap in funding, pension funds are scaling up their investments in real estate, the opposite of what we expected she would find. The resulting story isn’t just an incredibly informative read about how these funds invest, but a reminder about the importance of following the story, wherever it goes.
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MIKE PHILLIPS, UK Editor |
Meet Deano: He's Got A Problem. Soon It Will Be Commercial Property's Too
By David Thame, UK Reporter
David Thame is brilliant at highlighting the wider societal and economic trends that impact commercial real estate and explaining them to readers with flair and in an understandable way. Here he shows how the debt-linked problems of the UK’s everyperson, nicknamed Deano, will soon start to filter through and hit real estate owners hard.
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JON BANISTER, Deputy East Coast Editor |
Fort Belvoir Families File Class-Action Suit Over ‘Horrific’ Conditions In Private Military Housing
By Jacob Wallace, D.C. Reporter
“How could any military family get to a point where they are in that position?”
This question is asked in the story’s opening anecdote by Raven Roman, who led a class-action lawsuit against two private military housing contractors after finding ants, slugs and dangerous mold in her family’s Fort Belvoir home. And reporter Jacob Wallace attempts to answer the question over the course of this powerful feature story, digging into a series of legal actions involving the management of Fort Belvoir and exploring the larger, troubled history of privatized military housing in the U.S. and the unsuccessful attempts to reform it.
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JAY RICKEY, Director of Newsletters |
Trump Investigation Brings More Scrutiny To Secretive Way Commercial Properties Are Valued
By Jon Banister, Deputy East Coast Editor
The investigation into several dramatically altered property valuations on Trump properties ultimately ensnared Cushman & Wakefield, which was ordered by a judge to turn over documents related to its Trump appraisals as well as its appraisals on comparable buildings. Cushman appealed, calling the work it performs “intensely proprietary, private, confidential financial data." After being held in contempt, Cushman turned over 36,000 documents. The lawsuit — and Jon’s story — not only elevated the issue of secrecy in the appraisal process but also exposed how appraisers are pressured by large property owners with an enormous incentive to skew the numbers.
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'Rational To Be Anxious’: What Happens Next After Blackstone, Starwood’s Withdrawal Freeze
By Jon Banister, Deputy East Coast Editor
Nontraded REITs raised tens of billions in recent years, and this year continued reporting asset values going in the opposite direction of the rest of the market. But November was the first month ever in which these funds chose to halt redemptions. Jon’s article raises several questions: What will happen in the coming months if investors keep trying to pull their money out of the funds? Will Blackstone and Starwood be forced to sell assets? Will they write down the net asset values of their properties? If the funds write down asset values, they would also be lowering the caps for how much they will pay in redemptions. But write-downs in NAV could also lead more investors to try to pull out their money and could hurt nontraded REITs’ fundraising efforts, further exacerbating the issue they face today. This is a great article on a big topic the industry will likely see play out in 2023.
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JULIA TROY, Studio B Editor |
To Coat Or Not To Coat — That Is The Question Facing Owners Of Aging Masonry Buildings
By John Krukowski, Studio B Writer
At Studio B, the sponsored content department here at Bisnow, we have written about everything from the affordable housing crisis to the hottest office spots in Delaware to the predicted outcomes of this year’s major political races. Often, however, we write about very niche topics like the one this article is focused on — solid-pigmented acrylic coating for masonry walls. What I love about this article is that it highlights the creativity of Studio B’s most senior writer, John Krukowski, while also providing a thoughtful, in-depth explanation of this highly specific topic. Try not to laugh out loud at the headline and the lede and by the end of the piece, you may be surprised to discover that you’re walking away with some strong opinions on whether owners should coat their aging masonry buildings.
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TOM RUSSO, Chief Copy Editor |
Russia-Ukraine War: Why Global Real Estate Just Changed
David Thame, UK Reporter
Less than a week after the start of the Russia-Ukraine War, David Thame walked readers through what could be the start of something more like the Cold War than 30 years of world economic order. In compelling language that is never overwrought, he outlines the views of four experts on where the world of CRE property is likely to head next. Thame closes the story with a warning that wars are unpredictable, and things could get worse before they get better. When that was written in late February, few people — experts or otherwise — were publicly talking about the war still raging 10 months later.
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TIM CARROLL, NEWS EDITOR |
It's Apartment Move-In Season For Students In Boston, And Everything Is Taken
By Taylor Driscoll, Boston Reporter
Housing crunches notoriously affect the least fortunate most severely, and while some students come from wealthy families, it can be easy to forget that many struggle to get by. This story looks at the housing crisis through the lens of student housing in one of the nation’s top college cities — where universities are enrolling students in record numbers — and examines the way dwindling supply has pushed student populations and the general citizenry into competition for the same limited spaces.
