After this morning's education sessions, we ran into Pacific Property Group's Miles Kamimura and Shidler Pacific Advisors' Rachel Simmons, both from Honolulu. (So they're not too out of place with all of Florida's palm trees.) Miles tells us he found the discussion on the battle between e-commerce and retail the most interesting, because unlike the mainland US, it doesn't have a huge impact on Hawaii just yet. "Retail is the strongest segment of our three main food groups," he says, which include office and industrial. (We wonder how much those fundamentals have been impacted by all of the Hawaiian shirts Cassidy Turley's Garrick Brown has been wearing at the conference—he reports that preliminary Q2 vacancy there is 3.2%, second only to San Francisco, while it's No. 1 in the entire country for retail rents.)
These gals have a lot of casinos between them: From Las Vegas, we have Molasky Center's Anna Juarez and Colliers' Andrea Blue, and from New Jersey, we have Columbia Property Trust's Debbie Sparks, Bergman Real Estate Group's Robin-Ann Juron, and BOMA/New Jersey's Dolores Bocian. They've been partaking in the numerous educational sessions BOMA has scheduled each day, though Debbie says that you learn just as much from your peers as you do from the classroom.
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