Investors Pouncing On Boston Multifamily, Pushing Rents Up And Small Owners Out

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The largest private occupier of U.S. industrial real estate has begun to shift its strategy away from leasing warehouses, a decision that could upend what has become the preferred asset class for commercial real estate investors over the last 18 months.

Over the course of the last year, Amazon has gone from being indifferent on whether it leases or owns the millions of square feet that make up its industrial empire to preferring to buy and develop its own facilities, several industry sources with knowledge of Amazon’s activity tell Bisnow.  

Amazon has changed its approach to the industrial real estate market and its relationship with the developers who typically build and lease to the company, sources said. In some cases, it has backed out of lease discussions in order to pursue acquisitions, one source said. Others said the trillion-dollar company…

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LONDON — Let’s get straight to the point: Carbon offsetting has a bad rep. So why has one of London’s biggest and best-regarded property companies just announced it is bringing forward by five years its plans to start offsetting its carbon emissions?

“We recognise that the carbon offset market is nascent, but the stance we’re taking is we’ve got a climate emergency, and we can’t wait until it’s a perfect functioning market,” Tor Burrows, Grosvenor Britain & Ireland’s executive director of Sustainability and Innovation, told Bisnow. “We’ve got to be part of making it better. We’re going in to this with our eyes open.”

Grosvenor, which owns £6.7B of property directly and manages another £3.4B, is one of the many companies that in the past few years has set out a target to become net-zero carbon, meaning its portfolio removes as much carbon from the atmosphere as it emits, in its case by 2030. And it is one of the firms that is most openly and visibly wrestling with a fact that is not often acknowledged in the debate about how real estate can play its part in cutting global emissions: reducing emissions is going to be hard and messy, and it will involve contradictions, mistakes and difficult decisions about when to compromise and when to shoot for the moon. 

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