VOLUME 32, NUMBER 7
©2016 Law Bulletin Publishing Co.
July 2016
Savvy retailers letting Pokemon Go bring more foot traffic to their shops By Dan Rafter
S
mart retailers take advantage of hot trends. Just look at the way some are having fun, and boosting foot traffic, with the Pokemon Go mobile game. If you don’t know what Pokemon Go is, here’s a crash course: It’s an app that you can download to your phone based on the popular trading-card game and cartoon. In the game and cartoon, your goal is to collect creatures called Pokemon. The app lets you walk through your town and find Pokemon hiding in the wild. The game qualifies as a legitimate craze. Just look around the parks and sidewalks of your community. The odds are high that you’ll find kids, and adults, staring down at their phones on the hunt for Pokemon. The game also allows users to tag certain locations in their hometowns as Pokemon gyms. What happens next can actually be a benefit to business owners. Consider what the Blue Goose supermarket in the Chicago suburb of St. Charles, Illinois, has done. The store, which has been tagged as a Pokemon gym, has declared itself a “Pokemon Go Friendly Zone.” The supermarket has placed signs around the shop advertising this fact. At noon each day, the store gives away two free doughnuts to every Pokemon Go player who visits the shop’s bakery. Why do this? Pokemon Go players aren’t all kids. Many are in their late teens and mid-20s. Others are Pokemon to page 16
Office vacancy rates fall to lowest level since 2008 By Dan Rafter
T
he office sector isn’t as hot as multifamily or industrial. But this sector is seeing steady improvement across the nation, according to the latest numbers from CBRE.
According to CBRE, the vacancy rate of the U.S. office market fell 10 basis points during the second quarter of 2016, dropping to 13 percent. This means that the national office vacancy rate remains at its lowest level since 2008. “We continue to see slow, steady improvement in Office to page 16
Turning condos into apartments can make good money for developers, investors … if they avoid the pitfalls Here’s the advice Bloomberg shared during a recent interview with Minnesota Real Estate Journal.
by Dan Rafter David Bloomberg has seen the trend: Developers and investors are eagerly seeking to acquire condo buildings and turn them into apartments. This de-conversion trend is taking hold across the Midwest, and developers and investors stand to earn plenty of dollars from it. But Bloomberg, principal at Chicago law firm Chuhak & Tecson, says that converting condos to apartments isn’t always an easy task. There are plenty of potential pitfalls.
Bloomberg
The big challenge: We are seeing a lot of developers and investors interested in converting condominium buildings into rental apartments. We are getting calls about this on a regular basis, from
both developers and the owners of existing condo buildings. These people are asking us a lot of procedural questions, logistics questions. They want to know how the process works. This isn’t surprising. This is a unique deal structure. In a conversion, we are talking about unit owners and developers. You are not just buying a building. You have to first get title to all of the units in a condominium building to do these deals. That is the challenging part. Condos to page 14