Boston's Oversaturated Mall Market Is Being Hit Hard By The Retail Reckoning

This series delves into the myriad ways people enter the commercial real estate industry and what contributes to their success.

Angie Liou has become a prominent voice for Boston's Chinatown community after rising in the ranks of affordable housing efforts across the East Coast.

After moving from Taiwan to Philadelphia in 1997 at 17 to study sociology, she graduated and found her calling as an urban planner after briefly dabbling in law.

As executive director of the Asian Community Development Corp., Liou has served as lead on more than $150M in projects and asset management of more than 300 units, advancing affordable housing efforts with the community's marginalized voices in mind. Liou helped secure city approval last year for a 350-foot-tall mixed-use tower at a long-awaited parcel with up to 168 affordable for-sale and rental housing units, a joint venture with development titan Millennium Partners.

From leading project teams of all older White men as an Asian woman in her 20s, Liou has transitioned from the day-to-day management to guiding policy to protect ACDC's residents and overseeing its efforts to provide affordable housing in a community sorely lacking housing stock. 

Bisnow: How did you get introduced to CRE? Liou: I went to graduate school for urban planning, and that was my first introduction to real estate development. Before I started planning school, I thought this would lead to a career as a planner, but once I got exposed to real estate…

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Last year, one in five North American coworking locations either closed down or changed hands, according to a January report by coworking listing site Upsuite, leaving landlords to deal with a 25M SF fallout.

Many coworking and flex office operators fill their spaces with large, open floor plans, surrounded by offices as small as 80 SF. Their build-outs can cost up to 25% more than a traditional office takes to construct, experts say. The money landlords spent to attract Regus, WeWork and others, only to have them give up their spaces, has turned into a sunk cost.

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In this series, Bisnow highlights people and companies pushing the commercial real estate industry forward in myriad ways. Click here to read Q&As with all the innovators Bisnow has interviewed so far.

The gig economy comes to commercial real estate. Bullpen, an online CRE hiring platform, is working to change the way companies approach their growth strategies through the thick and thin of market cycles.

“I think that Bullpen is a place for people who are interested in having control over all their time and how their career looks,” Bullpen CEO Tyler Kastelberg said.

Burgeoning CRE industry players often face the challenge of how to approach hiring growth amid the natural waxing and waning of deal flow — an issue all too pertinent during the past year of elevated economic uncertainty. Over the past several years, the rise of the gig economy has lent unprecedented flexibility to both companies and workers alike for a range of industries in a model that has been strikingly missing from professional services roles in CRE.

Read the full story here.

Images of steel shipping containers interlinked at the seams, creating what looks like a beehive for humans, started capturing the real estate community's attention a decade ago.

For a few years starting in about 2010, shipping container commercial real estate projects were all the rage, with restaurants, retail, gyms, student housing and more constructed from shipping containers, oozing a cool "less is more" aesthetic.

Some architects and developers leaped on the construction method as an option to quickly and cheaply build affordable housing. But others say the method is being overused or misused and say shipping containers' strength as an affordable alternative to traditional construction has been blown out of proportion. 

Read the full story here.