Curated daily by our industry experts. Stay informed on how tech is shaping the real estate industry with these important headlines.
Los Angeles Business Journal
Santa Monica-based online real estate platform developer HomeLister Inc. has raised $4.5 million in seed funding led by venture capital firms MetaProp and Homebrew. The funding, announced Dec. 8, will go toward the further development of an online platform allowing homeowners to sell property without the assistance of a real estate agent.
HousingWire
Homebuyer, an Ohio-based software startup offering digital mortgages to first-time home buyers, announced on Monday it had snagged $1.4 million in a seed round from private investors. The company was founded in 2019 by Dan Green, under the mission to make homeownership more inclusive.
Bisnow
Cushman & Wakefield has tapped a former Goldman Sachs and Bank of America executive to lead its diversity and inclusion efforts. The Chicago-based brokerage has hired Nadine Augusta to serve as chief diversity, equity and inclusion officer.
CBRE
CBRE Group, Inc. (NYSE:CBRE) today announced that the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) has approved the company’s science-based target to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) from both CBRE’s own operations and the properties it manages for investors and occupiers.
The Wall Street Journal
Blackstone Group Inc. is amping up its bet on biotechnology lab space and other life-sciences real estate, agreeing to pay $3.45 billion for a portfolio of buildings primarily in the active Cambridge, Mass., market. The acquisition is the latest sign of growing investor interest in life-sciences real estate during the pandemic. Blackstone was already one of the world’s leading investors in this type of property even before the Covid-19 outbreak….
Building Engines
Prism is built to help owners, asset managers, property teams, leasing teams, and engineers achieve maximum net operating income (NOI) by reducing operating costs, increasing revenue, and by delivering an unmatched tenant experience, even when facing the challenges of the current CRE climate. Watch our on-demand webinar to hear Jesse Carrillo, Senior VP & CIO at Hines share his insights into the benefits of the platform as well as the Prism implementation from a global standpoint.
GlobeSt
Co-working franchisor Office Evolution is continuing its Texas expansion by signing leases for the brand’s first locations in San Antonio and Austin. These will be Office Evolution’s fifth and sixth locally owned locations in the Lone Star State.
The Real Deal
As fewer people have traveled — and thus, booked hotel rooms — because of the pandemic, the hotel industry is facing a staggering statistic: almost 1 billion empty hotel rooms for the year. As of last week, more than 962 million room nights have gone unsold, Bloomberg News reported, citing data from lodging information firm STR. That’s about 46 percent more than all of last year. The industry is projected to surpass 1 billion unsold rooms by Christmas.
The Real Deal
Deutsche Bank could move up to half of its Manhattan employees to smaller U.S. hubs in the next five years, as it plans a major building downsize. Christiana Reiley, the bank’s chief executive in the Americas, told the Financial Times that months of its employees having worked successfully from home has shown that jobs could be sent to lower-cost regions.
The New York Times
With the pandemic still in full swing and the first doses of a coronavirus vaccine just starting to ship in the United States, Google has pushed back the planned return to the office by a few months, to September 2021. But even as it extends the remote work period for most of its staff, Google is laying out a series of proposed changes that may substantially alter how its employees and people at other technology companies will work….
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