Fuse, which focuses on startups in the Seattle area and the Pacific Northwest, has now raised $420 million across two funds since its 2020 launch.

After a spat between Jeffrey Simpson and Jared Chassen wound up with both Arch Cos. founders in court, a judge called the dispute “childish” and ruled that the pair must try to work together again.
The disagreement began in early August, according to court documents. Chassen locked Simpson out of the company’s emails, its First Republic bank accounts and its Greenwich Village office, but Simpson alleges he had fired Chassen a day earlier for refusing to take a pay cut, The Real Deal reported.
“I don’t see why it would be so hard to trust two individuals who up until a month…

A North Side shopping center has traded for the first time in more than 20 years, equating to the second-priciest retail transaction in Chicago so far this year amid a dramatic slowdown in large deals.

Jacksonville, Florida-based Regency Centers paid roughly $27.5 million for the 87,100-square-foot Old Town Square at 424 West Division Street, CoStar reported. CBRE brokers Richard Frolik, George Good and Christian Williams represented the seller, a fund of Iowa-based Principal Life Insurance, which paid $19.8 million for the 5.4-acre site in 2001.

The profitable sale price is a sign of pushback, given the slowing demand for retail space and the depreciation of properties citywide amid rising interest rates. This year, there have been $1.5 billion of retail property sales in the Chicago area, on pace to fall well short of last year’s $4.7 billion of retail real estate deals. An increase of e-commerce, triggered by the pandemic, has delivered a blow to Chicago’s retail sector and caused a slew of landlords to pursue shopping center redevelopments.

Regency, however, is taking over a property that’s performing considerably better than other Chicago-area shopping centers plagued by vacant storefronts. Principal managed to boost Old Town Square’s occupancy rate to 97 percent by completing long-term leasing deals with most tenants. 

Grocery chain Jewel-Osco, the anchor tenant at the site, recently signed a 10-year lease extension, with six options for five-year extensions, the outlet reported. Wells Fargo Bank and Domino’s Pizza recently signed 10-year leases, as well.

Regency, led by CEO Lisa Palmer, is already a player in Chicago’s retail sector. The firm also owns the Clybourn Commons property at 2000 North Clybourn Avenue, just over a mile north of Old Town Square.

Chicago’s priciest retail transaction this year happened in April, when a European investor bought the 49,000-square-foot building at 914-926 West Fulton Market for $35 million. 

— Quinn Donoghue

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The UK senior living sector has strong demographic factors in its favour, but it isn’t immune to the problems besetting real estate more generally: rising interest rates, spiking construction costs and a cost-of-living crisis among its consumers.
To succeed in this environment, it pays to take a lesson from a musical innovator. 
“I talk about my Beyoncé strategy. We’ve been sent a whole truckload of lemons, so we’ve got to make some lemonade,” Birchgrove CEO Honor Barratt told the audience at Bisnow London’s Later Living: Meeting Residents’ Desires event, held at One Birdcage Walk. 

BFC Partners handed off its outlet mall on Staten Island after the property was purchased at auction by one of the operator’s senior lenders.

Goldman Sachs Urban Investment Group bought the Empire Outlets at a foreclosure auction held on Thursday for $10 million, the Staten Island Advance reported. The auction capped a foreclosure saga that lasted for nearly two years.

It’s unclear if Goldman Sachs intends to keep the mall operating in the same manner it has been, open for business despite the foreclosure action taken in February 2022. There are 37 storefronts in business at 55 Richmond Terrace, according to the outlet mall’s website.

Goldman Sachs wasn’t the only bidder on the 340,000-square-foot retail hub. Grinberg Management, a property management company based in Staten Island’s Port Richmond neighborhood, bid up to $9 million before ceding to Goldman Sachs.

The $350 million property, which has been credited as the first outlet mall in New York City, broke ground in 2015. After multiple construction delays that postponed a planned 2016 launch of the mall, Empire finally launched in 2019, just in time for the pandemic to wreck its fortunes. Eleven tenants quickly bailed after Covid’s onset, leaving 50,000 square feet vacant.

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BFC began missing debt payments to the New York City Economic Development Corporation in mid-2020. Storefronts remained empty as pandemic lockdown policies meant a drop in visitors.

BFC and senior lenders Goldman Sachs and Sterling National Bank agreed in 2022 to put the property into foreclosure. The deal was designed to allow the restructuring of debt on the property and was always expected to cost BFC the property. At the time, the possibility of the lenders bidding on the mall was present.

The Empire Outlets was expected to help drive a renaissance of Staten Island’s North Shore, but became one of several projects to fall by the wayside or struggle in recent years. This month, Mayor Eric Adams announced a $400 million investment for the North Shore, an investment carrying a pledge of 2,400 housing units, a school and open space.

— Holden Walter-Warner

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Billionaire hedge funder and South Florida real estate investor Ken Griffin yanked his support for Gov. Ron DeSantis’ bid for the White House. 

Griffin, a major GOP donor, so far isn’t enamored with any of the Republican presidential candidates, opting to stay “on the sidelines as to who to support in this election cycle,” he said in an interview with CNBC. This includes pulling his support for DeSantis, after originally backing the governor. Though his first term was “phenomenal,” DeSantis’ battle with Disney is “pointless,” Griffin told the news channel. 

“It doesn’t reflect well on the ethos of Florida,” he said. 

The Disney-DeSantis duel is over the theme parks company’s stance against Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law that muzzled discussions about gender affirming identity and sexual orientation in public schools. In response, DeSantis and his allies in the state legislature this year stripped Disney from control of a special taxing district that gave the company autonomy over its Orlando-area theme parks. The law allowed for DeSantis to appoint the board members. Disney and DeSantis are now battling it out in court. 

Griffin, who moved his Citadel and Citadel Securities’ headquarters to Miami’s Brickell from Chicago, has been building a real estate kingdom in South Florida valued at more than $1 billion. In July, he paid $83 million for an office building at 125 Worth Avenue in Palm Beach, and also took an ownership stake in the former Neiman Marcus department store building at 151 Worth Avenue.

The crown jewel of his empire was his $363 million purchase last year of a 2.5-acre bayfront development site at 1201 Brickell Bay Drive in Miami, where Citadel’s new headquarters is expected to be built. In the meantime, Griffin leased offices at Southeast Financial Center at 200 South Biscayne Boulevard in downtown Miami and at the 830 Brickell tower that’s under construction for his Citadel and Citadel Securities. 

Griffin also set a record on the residential front, paying $106.9 million for Adrienne Arsht’s 4-acre waterfront estate at 3031 and 3115 Brickell Avenue in Miami’s Coconut Grove last fall. The deal marked the first time a Miami-Dade County residential deal topped the $100 million mark. 

Now, as Griffin isn’t ready to throw his financial clout behind DeSantis or any other Republican running for the presidency, it could make a dent in candidates’ campaign coffers. Griffin, whose estimated net worth is roughly $35 billion, had shelled out over $100 million to state and federal candidates in last year’s midterms and $5 million in 2021 to a political action committee supporting DeSantis’ reelection as governor. 

Instead of the current challengers to front-runner Donald Trump, Griffin has his own vision of whom he would prefer for the ballot. 

“If I had my dream, we’d have a great Republican candidate in the primary who was younger, of a different generation, with a different tone for America. And we’d have a younger person on the Democratic side in the primary,” he told CNBC. “We’d have a debate around ideas and principles and policies to make this a great nation. We’re not having that dialogue right now.”

— Lidia Dinkova

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With its investment of up to $4 billion, Amazon is seeking a bigger footprint in A.I. development, one already established by rivals like Microsoft and Google.

During the pandemic, home sales boomed on a foundation of low-lying interest rates. Now real estate professionals are seeing the slowest market in 35 years.

With mortgage rates higher than 7 percent, Southern California home sales have fallen by almost half over the past two years, the Orange County Register reported.

Even with home prices inching back up as sales plummet because of the few number of homes for sale, real estate agents, home inspectors, escrow officers and mortgage brokers starve for business.

The average real estate agent earned 19 to 29 percent less business in the latest year measured, according to Real Data Strategies. At least 5,100 agents who made money in the prior year ended the most recent 12-month period without a single sale.

Helen Jeong, a Lake Elsinore agent with Keller Williams whose best year was in 2020 when five sales generated more money than she’d seen in 17 years in the industry, closed just three more sales over the next 2 ½ years.

“2020 was my best year,” Jeong told the Register between pep talks and training at the California Association of Realtors conference in Anaheim, where surviving the slowdown was a key theme. “After that, I’ve only had one closing per year, and that’s terrible.

“Buyers were all priced out.”

Realtors aren’t the only ones suffering. At the CAR conference’s booths for everything from home inspectors to home warranty providers, companies said their business is down 20 percent to 40 percent. Even providers of for-sale signs, lock-boxes and refrigerator magnets feel the pinch.

During the pandemic, home sales skyrocketed on mortgage rates averaging 3 percent for a 30-year, fixed-rate loan. A rise to 7 percent has all but killed the market.

Some 97,197 Southern California homes sold during the first seven months of this year, the lowest January-to-July total on record, CoreLogic figures show. This year’s sales were 41 percent lower than two years ago.

Gross revenue from sales fell by $114 billion in the 12 months ending in June in an area covered by the California Regional Multiple Listing Service, which includes most of Southern California. 

The “CLAW MLS,” which covers west Los Angeles and westside cities, had a $33 billion decrease, while a separate MLS system serving the Coachella Valley had a $5.2 billion revenue drop.

“All the ancillary services around real estate transactions are severely, severely impacted,” Pat Veling, president of Real Data Strategies in Laguna Beach, told the newspaper. “And that’s driving a really significant economic slowdown within the real estate and related channels.

“It’s bubbling under in the overall economy, and nobody’s really talking about it.”

— Dana Bartholomew

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The Art Institutes will close its private for-profit system of art schools and permanently close all of its campuses at the end of this month, the system announced late last week. 

Social media users seized on a weeks-old story in The Las Vegas Review-Journal to falsely accuse it of lying about the death of a retired police chief who was killed by a hit-and-run driver.