As Retail REIT Losses Deepen, Optimism Returns With Vaccine News, Spending Rebound

In May 2018, when Carrie Bobb arrived at the ICSC RECon conference in Las Vegas, she felt high-profile, even in a city filled with casinos and celebrities. A successful broker for CBRE in San Diego where she managed a $2B portfolio, Bobb, 39, was set to receive a national award for character, creativity and excellence in business at one of the largest events on the commercial real estate calendar; the ballroom where the event took place featured 20-foot-tall photos of her. The night after she was presented with the honor, she went out for a white-tablecloth dinner with a leading male executive at the firm. 

That night, Bobb alleges, she was drugged, sexually assaulted and raped by the executive (a toxicology report evaluated by a third party would later show she had date rape drugs in her system). Three days later, she filed a report with the Las Vegas Police.

But when she went to find justice via her company and potentially file a civil lawsuit, she found her options were curtailed by her employment contract. Due to a mandatory arbitration clause — a mechanism that sends cases to a private, non-public system of legal resolution that often favors the employer — she was legally barred from talking about the situation or case with anybody. She couldn’t even warn other co-workers they were working with an alleged predator. 

“Arbitration with sexual assault is a mechanism for companies,” she said. “If something bad happens, they can pull the lever and make the victim disappear. Your world is completely leveled, and you have to sit there and negotiate. And the process you go through is worse than the incident itself.” 

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In Case You Missed It...

The number of CMBS loans in the U.S. that have become delinquent and been transferred to special servicing this year is at the highest level since the aftermath of the Great Recession.

Most of those loans have been in the hardest-hit hotel and retail sectors, reflecting the almost-overnight disruption the coronavirus pandemic has caused to travel and shopping habits. Those segments are now at new peaks for delinquency. 

Across property types, loans are going to special servicing faster than during prior recessions, taking months instead of years and rocketing the overall market toward its previous peak at an unprecedented rate.

Read the full story here.