A report from Bolly Inside. "Flexible workspace provider Knotel has filed for bankruptcy and has announced plans to sell its business to listed real estate services company Newmark, the company said on Sunday. The pandemic has punished several workspace companies. In December, Serendipity Labs filed for bankruptcy and Montreal-based workspaces company Breather said it would abandon its more than 300 sites in the United States and Canada. Months earlier, Regus had bankrupted dozens of individual workspaces it operates across the country in order to waive or restructure those commitments."

From The Real Deal on New York. "For years, Long Island City has been experiencing rapid growth: New residential high-rises were built left and right, with thousands of residential units slated for delivery by 2020. But a lot can change in a couple of years. According to data from Trepp, occupancy at two major residential projects has declined sharply from last year, leading to debt backing those towers being added to the data firm’s watchlist."

"In 2018, the real estate marketplace Localize.city reported that 6,400 new residential units would be coming to Long Island City in 2020, the most of any neighborhood in NYC. But Covid stymied demand for those units; the number of new leases signed in Northwest Queens, which includes Long Island City, had declined every month for more than a year until recently, according to data from Douglas Elliman’s market reports. Rents in Northwest Queens, meanwhile, have also dropped sharply."

The New York Post. "The rolling wipeout of beloved New York City restaurants might only be getting started. And as painful as it would be to food lovers, it would hurt landlords even more as retail vacancies of all kinds mushroom in each of the five boroughs. The potential loss of so much ground-floor space could be the last straw for landlords already reeling from the wider retail collapse and from some lenders’ reluctance to renegotiate terms amid COVID-19 restrictions."

"A partner in a dozen three- to five-story apartment buildings in Manhattan that were heavily dependent on rental income from sidewalk-level restaurants told The Post, 'Some of them are zombies, meaning they’ll use my space only as long as the rent moratorium goes on.' The landlord, who didn’t want to be named because 'everybody will hate me,' said, 'It’s bad enough they’re not paying me — even after I offered them deals. It’s worse when they turn out the lights. There aren’t enough nail salons on Earth to fill them all.'"

The Pittsburgh Post Gazette in Pennsylvania. "At one time, Ninth Street and Penn Avenue was considered the next big development site Downtown, with plans for up to 185 high-end condos, 30,000 square feet of retail, and a new parking garage. Then it all fell apart. Even before the pandemic hit, the condo and retail proposal fizzled. And now the garage may be in jeopardy as well. 'If revenues don’t come back and parkers don’t come back, is there a need for another 700 spaces Downtown when we can’t fill the ones we have?' asked Pittsburgh Parking Authority executive director David Onorato."

From Bisnow Boston in Massachusetts. "As more and more new life sciences developments are announced in and around Boston, experts are starting to question whether the market could possibly keep up with the froth. The region now has approximately 30M SF of lab space, according to Colliers International, nearly twice as much as it had in 2010, when the market sat at 16M SF, according to Cushman & Wakefield. This year, the market is set to deliver 4M SF of lab space, a roughly 13% increase in supply. In the coming years, the pipeline sits as high as 18M SF, according to some estimates, which would increase the supply after 2021 by more than 50%."

"Allianz U.S. Real Estate CEO Christoph Donner, whose firm last October made a significant loan on a downtown Boston office building, said not every piece of land works for life sciences, even if the demand for that property type is fueling billions worth of investment. 'We do see a lot of life science opportunities; when you dig a little deeper, it’s an ordinary office building with a sign on it,' Donner said. 'That’s clearly not what we’re looking for. Really finding the right location, the right operator and the connection to tenants is key. There’s a lot of capital chasing it.'"

From Inside Hook in California. "Michael Bellings, a third-generation real estate agent (and San Franciscan), thinks S.F. real estate is a perpetual buy, despite the occasional gloom. 'I don’t think we’re going to have double-digit gains, like we’ve been used to over my whole career, but I think mid-level single-digit appreciation gains will definitely be seen. With the large, 'hotel-like' buildings — specifically in SoMa, Downtown, what we call like District 9 — no one wanted to pay $1,200 a month for the HOA dues for a gym and a pool that weren’t open. No one wanted to share an elevator with six people, and no one wanted to be in a 300-unit building, and no one was walking to work.The beauty of SoMa is that you can walk a block to Twitter, and that wasn’t happening. For those buildings, it was a bad, perfect storm."

The Marina Times in California. "Rents in San Francisco closed out 2020 with a 2.7 percent drop in December, bringing the 12-month decline to 27 percent, according to Apartment List. San Francisco has the largest drop in rents in the Bay Area, but it is not alone. Apartment List reports that rents fell in all of the 10 largest cities in the metro area; for example, rents in Oakland declined 13.7 percent in 2020, and San Mateo’s dropped 15.6 percent over the same time period."

The Midland Reporter Telegram in Texas. "ApartmentList showed Midland with the second highest year-over-year drop in the nation (30.2 percent), trailing only Odessa (33.3 percent). Odessa and Midland led even larger cities like San Francisco (27.0 percent), New York (21.2 percent) and Seattle (20.0 percent). It is the second straight January that Midland rents dropped year over year."

From Community Impact in Texas. "Convention-less. Festival-less. Tourism-less. In downtown Austin, the pandemic has taken the regular menu of revenue drivers off the table. The drain has made the math especially difficult for restaurants and bars, where bottom lines also depend on a now-dissipated office workforce, and smaller real estate footprints exacerbate the impact of social distancing rules. Business owners cited the pandemic as the main reason for closure; however, all listed contributing factors such as soaring property taxes, concerns about public safety and the rise in the visibility of people experiencing homelessness."

From KDVR in Colorado. "Every county in the Denver metro area had double-digit increases in auto thefts according to the Metropolitan Auto Theft Task Force. The Task Force’s 2020 Motor Vehicle Theft report reveals auto theft was on a gradual decline during the first two months in 2020 right before the pandemic. Just as the 'stay at home' order went into effect the week of March 15, auto theft started to skyrocket. The report shows the fourth quarter averaged 459 car thefts per week, a 95% increase."

"One Denver man tells the FOX31 Problem Solvers he was assaulted when he approached a group of men attempting to steal a car. 'I said what’s going on and somebody hit me in the face,' he said. Rick Martinez is happy to have his truck back after it was stolen near Sheridan Boulevard and Colfax Avenue but now it’s missing a catalytic converter, several keepsakes and has a ripped tarp. 'Two-thousand dollars worth of damage to my vehicle probably and they’re probably going to get $30 out of it,' he said."

From My Northwest in Washington. "A Seattle resident named Kristine says she was attacked during a break-in at her condo building in Greenwood. She’s lived in the New York area and Chicago, but says she never felt unsafe until moving to Seattle. 'Outside my dining room window, you could see the back door of my building, and my partner Todd looked out and saw just tons of stuff being stockpiled out there,' she said. 'So it was pretty obvious that we were being robbed at the time,' she told the Dori Monson Show on KIRO Radio."

"'I asked this woman to leave and she started yelling at me,' Kristine said. ‘And what made me even more upset was that she kept saying over and over how there was nothing I could do about it, that even if she were to be arrested — which she felt like she wouldn’t be — that she would just be let go. And it was no problem, that she could do whatever she wanted.'"

From Willamette Weekly in Oregon. "It's actually a flaming, apocalyptic disaster out there. At least, that's how it's depicted in Forbes, in an op-ed titled 'Death of a City: The Portland Story?' In a throwback to last summer's 'everything is on fire all the time' rhetoric, author Bill Conerly insists the city is on the verge of being abandoned or wiped off the map entirely. Despite referencing Pompeii, Conerly writes that a natural disaster isn't likely to cause Portland's undoing, but a combination of social ills, including housing prices, having to actually see people experiencing houselessness and, of course, anti-fascist riots."

"'Portland has shot itself in the foot,' he concludes. 'Most likely, the people of the city will come around and seek treatment. But if they don't, the wound will prove fatal.' Well, that would certainly suck. But hey, look on the bright side: Living in the burnt-out husk of a major American city means shorter lines for brunch when we can all go out to eat again, right?"