It doesn’t take much of a drive to escape out of the fourth-largest city in the U.S. and head into nature.

“Heading just north of The Woodlands, there is absolutely beautiful, rolling topography,” says Peter Barnhart, Executive Vice President and Partner at Caldwell Companies.

That’s the setting for Chambers Creek, Caldwell’s newest 1,200-acre active adult community in Willis, TX offering 4,000 homes to those age 55 and better. The premier 55+ community, which will be the largest of its kind in the Houston area, features amenities such as a golf course designed by Tom Lehman, a marina connected to Lake Conroe, miles of hiking and biking trails, and so much more.

“It’s the prettiest piece of property we’ve developed in Houston,” says Barnhart. “It has a 20-mile view from a hill that looks out over Lake Conroe. It’s loaded with lakes. We’re creating a lifestyle like I’ve never seen in Houston, and we’re anticipating more of a national draw.” Being the largest active adult community developer in this region for over 15 years now, Caldwell has a passion for providing housing designed specifically for those 55 and up.

Looking at the tract, he says it checked all the boxes of a great site, but the biggest selling point was the spectacular location. Not only does the site have great access to Interstate 45 it is also located right in the path of growth. The Conroe/Willis area is one of the fastest-growing cities in the country. Conroe’s population has more than doubled since 2000 according to the Conroe Economic Development Council. Click to read more at www.rednews.com.

Two years after WeWork’s attempt to become a public company flamed out spectacularly, the co-working giant started trading on the stock market on Thursday, hoping that investors will now believe in its prospects.

The earlier effort collided with concerns about WeWork’s breakneck growth, its huge losses and the alarming management style of its co-founder Adam Neumann. WeWork has new leaders who have pared back its expenses and hope to exploit an office space market that has been upended by the pandemic. But the company still has lofty growth targets, big losses and many empty desks in its 762 locations around the world. And WeWork made it through the last two years only because of huge financial support from SoftBank, the Japanese conglomerate that is WeWork’s largest shareholder.

“We got here on a different road than we anticipated, but we’re here,” Marcelo Claure, WeWork’s executive chairman and a senior SoftBank executive, said in an interview Thursday with CNBC.

Instead of an initial public offering, WeWork entered the public markets by merging with a special-purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, something of a craze these days. It is expected to raise as much as $1.3 billion from the deal, a sum that includes stakes held by the investment firms BlackRock and Fidelity. At Thursday’s stock price, WeWork was worth about $9.5 billion, a fraction of the $47 billion valuation placed on the company before investors soured on it in 2019. Click to read more at www.nytimes.com.

Nearly 50 million workers switched last year from an office environment to work-from-home (WFH), allowing large parts of the U.S. economy to continue functioning despite social distancing requirements during the pandemic. As other sectors began to recover from the shutdowns last year, however, large numbers of workers remained at home, causing some concerns about possible longer-term impacts of WFH on the markets for office commercial real estate. Despite some twists and turns due to the Delta variant, the most recent news suggests the return-to-office (RTO) is rebounding.

The RTO began as the economy started to reopen, and proceeded through much of last year. 16 million workers had returned to the office by October 2020, a one-third decline in WFH in six months. Being back in the office has always been contingent on progress in bringing the pandemic under control, however, and the surge in COVID cases late last year brought about a partial reversal in RTO in November and December.

Fortunately, RTO regained momentum earlier this year as tens of millions of Americans received vaccinations against the coronavirus. By July 2021, the number of people working from home had declined nearly 60% from its peak in May 2020. (I discussed the progress in RTO in an earlier Forbes article in July 2021) Click to read more at www.forbes.com.