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Can the French Reinvent America's Broken Department-Store Model?

Can the French Reinvent America's Broken Department-Store Model?

The American department-store model is broken. A French operator that recently opened a flagship store in New York City thinks it has a better one.
Printemps New York is following the European department-store playbook of serving up enough food and drinks, exhibitions and other activities to keep shoppers occupied far beyond the fitting room.
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Apartment deal flow falls 14% in Q2
Apartment deal flow falls 14% in Q2

Yahoo

time2 hours ago

  • Yahoo

Apartment deal flow falls 14% in Q2

This story was originally published on Multifamily Dive. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily Multifamily Dive newsletter. Dive Brief: Apartment sales volume fell 14% year over year to $35.1 billion in the second quarter, according to a report that data firm MSCI Real Assets shared with Multifamily Dive. However, they rose 5% to $66.6 billion in the first half of the year. Unlike the Q2 2024, no major entity-level deals closed in 2025. Last year, New York City-based investment manager Blackstone took Denver-based Apartment Income REIT Corp. private for approximately $10 billion, which drove transaction volume. The Real Capital Analytics commercial property price indexes ticked up 0.1%, according to MSCI. Cap rates have remained flat at 5.7% over the past year. Dive Insight: In its monthly report, MSCI acknowledged that the headline sales numbers for 2025 appear unfavorable. But if you dig a little deeper, things are more promising. 'The reality, though, is that the market is still the largest, most liquid component of the commercial real estate market in the U.S., with deal volume just below pre-pandemic levels,' MSCI said in the report. 'The decline for the quarter was an artifact of one big deal in the same quarter last year.' Individual asset sales, often considered the bedrock of multifamily transactions, rose 15% YOY in Q2 to $28 billion. In the five years before the pandemic, apartment trades averaged $29 billion in Q2. In the six major metropolitan areas of Boston; New York City; Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles; San Francisco; and Chicago, individual sales increased 6% to $6.7 billion in Q2. In the non-major metros, activity for these deals increased 18% YOY in the quarter on sales of $21.3 billion. Portfolio sales fell 57% to $7.1 billion in Q2. No portfolio was traded for more than $1 billion, with the six largest priced at more than $400 million. Apartment investors say the transaction market slowed noticeably after President Donald Trump's tariff announcements in April. 'We're dealing with tariffs,' Jim Brooks, president of Los Angeles-based real estate investor BH Properties, told Multifamily Dive. 'We're dealing with elevated interest rates, and not a lot of cuts are projected. So there is a high cost of capital. Things have gotten slower on the capital market side.' However, Brooks remains hopeful that things will pick up for his firm, partially because institutional investors are still not fully back in the market. 'We're optimistic, just given the way we're capitalized and the way we can operate,' Brooks said. 'Privately capitalized investment groups should have their moment in the sun before institutional capital comes flooding back in.' Click here to sign up to receive multifamily and apartment news like this article in your inbox every weekday. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data

ETF Wave Hasn't Crested Yet, Tidal Co-Founder Says
ETF Wave Hasn't Crested Yet, Tidal Co-Founder Says

Yahoo

time9 hours ago

  • Yahoo

ETF Wave Hasn't Crested Yet, Tidal Co-Founder Says

Tidal Financial Group had quite a different name when it was founded in 2012. Back then, it was called Toroso, which means 'bull' and 'bear' in Spanish. Now, the New York City-based firm has found success as a third-party service provider that helps build and manage exchange traded funds, and its list of clients keeps growing. Co-founder and Chief Investment Officer Michael Venuto sat down with ETF Upside to talk about the company's roots and what excites him about the future of the business. READ ALSO: Gimme an S&P 500 ETF, Hold the Dividends and Why the SEC Delayed In-Kind Redemptions for Crypto ETFs ETF Upside: Tell us a bit about how Tidal got started and the changes it's been through. Michael Venuto: The idea was to sell SMAs of ETFs — that was very popular back then. I raised some money to start the firm, and I thought all these relationships that I've had for all these years are just going to be like, 'Yeah, Mike — great. Let's do this.' And they didn't. They all said, 'Come back when you have X amount of dollars and when you have a three-year track record.' So we pivoted a bit and said, 'We've got all this great research that's helping us build our portfolios. Could that help asset managers sell their products?' And that's the direction the firm went into the next three or four years. That became a business. It kept the lights on, and we went from not paying ourselves to paying ourselves a third of what we made before we started the firm. Direxion's then-Chief Operating Officer Eric Falkeis said, 'What if I came over there and helped you build the trust? And therefore we could help people grow their assets, but have a carry in the business by being a service provider to them.' Very quickly we got some traction. We got SoFi as a client early on. We got this group, RPAR, that has the Risk Parity ETF. We got this Sharia-compliant manager that nobody had ever heard of, but all of a sudden they're launching ETFs and growing like a weed. It was pretty exciting times. Then it just became about execution. That business model, from 2018 to today, has grown from $1 billion to $36 billion. Today we oversee 230 ETFs and have 76 relationships and 130 employees. It's been an overnight success after 13 years. There are now more active ETFs in the US market than passive ones, thanks in part to the many niche and single-stock products out there. What are your thoughts on that trend? It was a foregone conclusion 10 years ago that there were going to be more ETFs than actual stocks. The way things have come out is different. It's pretty frothy right now. We have this metric that we post each week, the open-to-close ratio, and it's close to five right now, meaning for every five ETFs that launch, only one is closing. Industry health is usually around two. But, we've moved upmarket. We're not really dealing with your day-to-day, call it 'ETF entrepreneur' so much anymore. I think they've learned the lesson that it's really hard. The clients that we're dealing with now tend to be people who already have assets and are just looking to move them towards a better structure. How many ETFs do you think the market can handle? You've still got three times the amount of mutual funds that you do with ETFs. A lot of people are using these ETFs as solutions for their existing business. It's not like there's new assets — it's just putting them into a more efficient vehicle. We're seeing a lot of requests for conversions. What would the advent of dual share classes, pending SEC approval, mean for Tidal? I just attended this founder summit, this was like 30 of the founders in the ETF industry. We probably spent an hour and a half on this subject. The conclusion is that it's going to be good for a few people, but the pipes aren't really there to make this easy for everybody to do. I think this is going to be a boon for DFA or anyone who hasn't fully converted things, anybody who's got both a broker-dealer and the captive assets — that's one of the big benefits Vanguard's always had with this. People have been able to easily switch from the mutual fund to the ETF without taking a tax gain. Any mutual fund shop that is going to have a share class in an ETF, they need to either hire a capital markets team that understands how to deal with all these things, or hire Tidal. This post first appeared on The Daily Upside. To receive exclusive news and analysis of the rapidly evolving ETF landscape, built for advisors and capital allocators, subscribe to our free ETF Upside newsletter. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data

Trump rollback on clean energy subsidies stalls major solar, wind projects and manufacturing plans
Trump rollback on clean energy subsidies stalls major solar, wind projects and manufacturing plans

Fast Company

time9 hours ago

  • Fast Company

Trump rollback on clean energy subsidies stalls major solar, wind projects and manufacturing plans

Singapore-based solar panel manufacturer Bila Solar is suspending plans to double capacity at its new factory in Indianapolis. Canadian rival Heliene's plans for a solar cell facility in Minnesota are under review. Norwegian solar wafer maker NorSun is evaluating whether to move forward with a planned factory in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And two fully permitted offshore wind farms in the U.S. Northeast may never get built. These are among the major clean energy investments now in question after Republicans agreed earlier this month to quickly end U.S. subsidies for solar and wind power as part of their budget megabill, and as the White House directed agencies to tighten the rules on who can claim the incentives that remain. This marks a policy U-turn since President Donald Trump's return to office that project developers, manufacturers and analysts say will slash installations of renewable energy over the coming decade, kill investment and jobs in the clean energy manufacturing sector supporting them, and worsen a looming U.S. power supply crunch as energy-hungry AI infrastructure expands. Solar and wind installations could be 17% and 20% lower than previously forecast over the next decade because of the moves, according to research firm Wood Mackenzie, which warned that a dearth of new supplies could slow the expansion of data centers needed to support AI technology. Energy researcher Rhodium, meanwhile, said the law puts at risk $263 billion of wind, solar, and storage facilities and $110 billion of announced manufacturing investment supporting them. It will also increase industrial energy costs by up to $11 billion in 2035, it said. 'One of the administration's stated goals was to bring costs down, and as we demonstrated, this bill doesn't do that,' said Ben King, a director in Rhodium's energy and climate practice. He added the policy 'is not a recipe for continued dominance of the U.S. AI industry.' The White House did not respond to a request for comment. The Trump administration has defended its moves to end support for clean energy by arguing the rapid adoption of solar and wind power has created instability in the grid and raised consumer prices – assertions that are contested by the industry and which do not bear out in renewables-heavy power grids, like Texas' ERCOT. Power industry representatives, however, have said all new generation projects need to be encouraged to meet rising U.S. demand, including both those driven by renewables and fossil fuels. Consulting firm ICF projects that U.S. electricity demand will grow by 25% by 2030, driven by increased AI and cloud computing – a major challenge for the power industry after decades of stagnation. The REPEAT Project, a collaboration between Princeton University and Evolved Energy Research, projects a 2% annual increase in electricity demand. With a restricted pipeline of renewables, tighter electricity supplies stemming from the policy shift could increase household electricity costs by $280 a year in 2035, according to the REPEAT Project. The key provision in the new law is the accelerated phase-out of 30% tax credits for wind and solar projects: it requires projects to begin construction within a year or enter service by the end of 2027 to qualify for the credits. Previously the credits were available through 2032. Now some project developers are scrambling to get projects done while the U.S. incentives are still accessible. But even that strategy has become risky, developers said. Days after signing the law, Trump directed the Treasury Department to review the definition of 'beginning of construction.' A revision to those rules could overturn a long-standing practice giving developers four years to claim tax credits after spending just 5% of project costs. Treasury was given 45 days to draft new rules. 'With so many moving parts, financing of projects, financing of manufacturing is difficult, if not impossible,' said Martin Pochtaruk, CEO of Heliene. 'You are looking to see what is the next baseball bat that's going to hit you on the head.' About face Heliene's planned cell factory, which could cost as much as $350 million, depending on the capacity, and employ more than 600 workers, is also in limbo, Pochtaruk said in an interview earlier this month. The company needs more clarity on both what the new law will mean for U.S. demand, and how Trump's trade policy will impact the solar industry. 'We have a building that is anxiously waiting for us to make a decision,' Pochtaruk said. Similarly, Mick McDaniel, general manager of Bila Solar, said 'a troubling level of uncertainty' has put on hold its $20 million expansion at an Indianapolis factory it opened this year that would create an additional 75 jobs. 'NorSun is still digesting the new legislation and recent executive order to determine the impact to the overall domestic solar manufacturing landscape,' said Todd Templeton, director of the company's U.S. division that is reviewing plans for its $620 million solar wafer facility in Tulsa. Five solar manufacturing companies – T1 Energy, Imperial Star Solar, SEG Solar, Solx and ES Foundry – said they are also concerned about the new law's impact on future demand, but that they have not changed their investment plans. The policy changes have also injected fresh doubt about the fate of the nation's pipeline of offshore wind projects, which depend heavily on tax credits to bring down costs. According to Wood Mackenzie, projects that have yet to start construction or make final investment decisions are unlikely to proceed. Two such projects, which are fully permitted, include a 300-megawatt project by developer US Wind off the coast of Maryland and Iberdrola's 791 MW New England Wind off the coast of Massachusetts. Neither company responded to requests for comment. 'They are effectively ready to begin construction and are now trapped in a timeline that will make it that much harder to be able to take advantage of the remaining days of the tax credits,' said Hillary Bright, executive director of offshore wind advocacy group Turn Forward.

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