Amazon Is The 'Golden Cow' Driving Boston's Industrial Market To New Heights

With its retail portfolio in coastal U.S. markets still facing pandemic-related restrictions, one of the largest publicly traded retail owners is looking to deploy capital to expand into new parts of the country.

Federal Realty Investment Trust CEO Don Wood said on the firm's fourth-quarter earnings call Friday it has $800M in cash on hand, an untapped $1B credit facility and relatively little debt due in the coming years, giving it the ability to make new investments.

"We've got something of a war chest on hand, should we find retail opportunities that fit our business model in 2021 and 2022," Wood said on the call, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript. 

"And make no mistake, we're actively looking, including in markets with hot job and income growth where we haven't looked before," Wood added. "A little more geographic diversity in our income stream carefully considered is an objective of ours."

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Marriott International CEO Arne Sorenson has died after a nearly two-year battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 62. Sorenson, the third CEO in Marriott's history and the first from outside the Marriott family, passed away unexpectedly Monday, the firm >

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In Case You Missed It...

Nearly a year into the coronavirus pandemic, the future of office space is still an open question. Vaccines are being administered, but as a return to the office becomes a more realistic possibility, opinion varies widely on what office workers, especially tech and highly skilled workers used to an array of amenities, will want from office space in the future — or whether they will want it very much at all.

Even as surveys show that 60% of businesses plan to shrink their office footprints and with the likes of IWG CEO Mark Dixon saying offices have changed forever, companies are making plans. Some, such as Salesforce.com, have already decided remote work will be a permanent feature going forward for their tens of thousands of employees, with about 65% of Salesforce's 54,000 employees in the office no more than one to three days per week.

“We’re not going back to the way things were,” Salesforce President and Chief People Officer Brent Hyder told The Wall Street Journal. “I don’t believe that we’ll keep every space in every city that we’re in, including San Francisco.”

With different corporate cultures, disparate communal space requirements and varying views on the effectiveness of remote work, finding a consensus on the future of office space is going to be a drawn-out process in which office owners and managers are going to have to pay attention to tenants like never before, experts say. It won't be easy.

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