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As of October 19, 2026, Los Angeles accepts cultivation license applications from all eligible applicants. For industrial owners and buyers, the building is the bottleneck.

When a retail or restaurant tenant asks us about parking, the question is almost always about cost. What's the validation program, is it metered, what will customers pay. That's the wrong question, or at least the second question. The first one is simpler: how many spaces actually exist within a two-minute walk of the front door, and who controls them? The gap between LA-area districts on this is much bigger than most tenants realize, and it usually comes down to whether the

Retail is tight in 2026, but not because demand exploded — because almost nothing got built. What that changes at the negotiating table, and where the thesis breaks down.

Sometimes the hardest part of site selection isn't finding the right location. It's watching a competitor get there first because they're willing to pay a rent that doesn't make sense for anyone operating a normal, disciplined model. We've worked with a client whose direct competitor — a much better-capitalized brand in the same category — has been willing to pay close to double what our client's economics can support, just to lock down the best-known, highest-traffic centers

Cap rate is famous—but it's incomplete. Learn the five metrics that actually matter when evaluating investment property.

Drive through parts of South LA and you'll see it constantly: building-sized portraits of Nipsey Hussle, Kobe Bryant, and other figures who matter to the neighborhood's history, painted across walls that would otherwise just be blank retail frontage. It's some of the best public art in the city, and it raises a question I get from clients fairly often when they're building out a location: can I do something like that on my building? And more specifically — can I put my brand

Site selection is competitive advantage. Here's what franchises miss, and how to do it right.

Over the years, we've picked up locations that used to belong to other franchisees of the same national retail brand who went out of business — sometimes for close to nothing, simply by taking over their leases. Not because the concept didn't work. Because the operator and the real estate strategy behind them didn't. Many of those failed operators were multi-unit franchisees from out of state, unfamiliar with the local market, leaning entirely on the judgment of their corpora

A client once told me exactly what he wanted: a smaller industrial building, in a specific submarket, at a specific price point. Nothing complicated. When something matching that exact profile hit the market, we moved on it fast and got it under contract. On paper, that sounds simple enough that you'd wonder why he needed a broker at all. He knew what he wanted. The property matched. Why not just do it himself? Here's why: he's not in the business of watching the market. He's

People talk about "getting into the right shopping center" like that's the whole game. It's not. I've owned retail stores in centers that were unquestionably A — great anchors, strong overall traffic — and still watched two stores in the same center perform completely differently based on which side of the parking lot they were on. At Westside One, the center at Sawtelle and Olympic anchored by Marshalls and Michaels, there were two available spaces on either side of the main

Years ago, when I was in wireless retail, there was a franchise group called Mobile Systems Wireless — based in San Diego, operating under whichever wireless brand they were affiliated with at the time. What set them apart wasn't their product. It was culture. They had a hustle mentality unlike any other operator I saw in that industry, and it was built entirely around one strategic bet: instead of opening on major retail corridors or next to a supermarket or Target like ever

Walk through a pocket district like Larchmont Village for twenty minutes and you notice the pattern: people aren't just browsing. At some point, they want to stop moving. They want to sit down, eat something, and actually spend time — with their kids, on a date, catching up with a friend. That twenty-minute walk is the appetizer. The thirty minutes sitting down is the meal. That's why seating capacity might be one of the most underrated variables in site selection for food an

We get some version of this question a lot from food and beverage tenants looking at Los Angeles locations: can I get a patio here? The instinct is to think about it as a zoning question — is this block zoned for it, is this neighborhood allowed to have it. That's not really how it works. The City of Los Angeles made its Al Fresco outdoor dining ordinance permanent in December 2023. Outdoor dining is allowed by-right in any zone where a restaurant is already a permitted use —

We had a retail food tenant under contract for a space that looked, on paper, like a great fit. Good location, good landlord, good rent. The landlord told us there wouldn't be any issues getting food-use approval. We took that at face value and moved forward. Around the same time, we were looking at a separate property for the same type of tenant. That landlord was upfront about something we hadn't considered: the city was actively trying to limit the number of food tenants i