Back when I first got into the industry in the late 1980s, if I needed information on a property’s real estate taxes, it was not unusual to actually have to go to physically go to a county assessor’s office and access the data on microfiche. Fortunately, those days are long gone. For the most part,… Continue reading Real estate tax resources
When reconciling operating expenses, timing is often pretty straightforward. The tenants make monthly escrow payments throughout the year. The landlord reconciles the calendar year and applies those payments. An additional billing or credit is applied to a tenant’s account. However, taxes are a different story. While some municipalities bill taxes for calendar years, many bill… Continue reading Real estate tax timing issues
Next week will be back to the regular lease administration blog, but, for now, a little more Mexican retail. One sight in Puebla that does not show up on TripAdvisor is truly “experiential retail” – Container City. Puebla is very much a university town, and Container City is an area designed for those students. It… Continue reading Unique retail environment
This week, the blog will not be about lease administration. Rather, it is just a few pictures to give you confidence going in to the upcoming holiday retail season. My wife and I are visiting our son in Puebla, Mexico this week. We happened to arrive during Buen Fin – the Mexican version of Black… Continue reading Buen Fin!
This past week, we worked on a 40 tenant open air center acquisition. Often times, a seller severely restricts the information provided to our clients, the buyers. Fortunately, this time, we had almost free access to the seller’s files. Many of the leases were leases that had been amended and extended 3,4,5 times since their… Continue reading Prior defaults
There is a really great class offered by ICSC fairly regularly, Finance and Accounting for Non-Financial Shopping Center Professionals. I have taught a part of this class since 1996. There is also another class, the Economics of the Deal/Lease. Both are for those in the industry that don’t have to regularly deal with numbers, and… Continue reading Property managers and operations managers – Help me help you!
I have been in the industry now since 1987. In 30+ years, we have worked with hundreds of great, honest landlords. And, one that wasn’t. Though it hurts to give up business, we did because of our own ethics. We were doing the year end reconciliations for the owner and, at one property, there were… Continue reading The trust required between landlords and tenants
We are always considering retail from the landlord perspective, and there is so much to consider as retailers and landlords emphasize the experience. But, over the past two weeks, I have been on the other side of the equation – feeling the impact of showrooming and experiential retail as a consumer. Two weeks ago, I… Continue reading Experiential retail as a consumer
Often in retail, tenants will be required to pay their share of taxes using the square footage of the tax parcel of which they are apart. In other cases, they will be required to pay based upon the leasable area of the shopping center excluding separately assessed premises. Sometimes, just looking at the tax map… Continue reading Why look at a municipality’s tax maps or GIS data?
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