Construction Cost Curveballs Haven't Stunted Confidence In Atlanta's Development Pipeline

Despite early pandemic fears about the future of brick-and-mortar retail, everyone still had to eat. So it wasn’t exactly surprising that even through the strictest lockdowns, grocery-anchored retail proved almost crisis-proof. 

But now, two years after the start of the coronavirus outbreak, the feeding frenzy is only intensifying as institutional investors vie to pick up safe bets to mitigate rampant inflation and benefit from surging rents, and traditional mall retailers like Sephora begin thinking outside the box to consider spaces in grocery-anchored properties.

"If I never worked on anything but grocery-anchored centers again, it would be a great way to end a career," JLL Retail Group Senior Managing Director Barry Brown said. "It's a very liquid asset class, and there's a very broad investor appetite for it, really more so than other product verticals within the retail space."

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In Case You Missed It...

On this episode of Bisnow Reports, we sit down with Nathalie Palladitcheff, the CEO and president of Ivanhoé Cambridge, the real estate giant that is a subsidiary of Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, an institutional investor that manages the pension plans and insurance programs of Québec.

Palladitcheff is the first female CEO of Ivanhoé Cambridge, and her appointment in 2019 made the company the only major pension fund in Canada with a woman in the top job. Last week, she spoke at Bisnow's inaugural Rise Initiative event, which recognized commercial real estate companies making real progress with their DEI initiatives.

On the podcast, Palladitcheff spoke about diversity in hiring, how real estate is responding to the climate crisis, balancing a $60B portfolio and how the pension funds view real estate in an environment of inflation.

“If you look backward, inflation has always been in favor of real estate in terms of asset allocation, because doing bonds current is quite tricky, stock exchange is very volatile, the geopolitical risk is really rising from day to day so going to tangible assets, illiquid assets could make sense,” she said. “So I think it’s very good for infrastructure and real estate as soon as you are able to pass on the inflation to the tenant.”

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