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Out of nearly 30 applicants, the finalists include: Rize Up Bakery, Calaca Coffee, The Uncreamery, Whack Donuts, and Kiss My Boba

SAN FRANCISCO, April 12, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — Raydiant, the leading in-store experience management platform for brick-and-mortar enterprises, today announced the five finalists for its “Rising Entrepreneur” contest. Finalists will pitch to a panel of judges on Friday, April 15th at Raydiant’s San Francisco HQ in a Shark Tank-inspired contest setting. One winner will receive the opportunity to open their own brick-and-mortar retail location at 35 Stillman Street – a commercial real estate package valued at over $50,000.  

While the finalists represent unique retail offerings or concepts, they all share a passion to grow in their entrepreneurial journey and to invest in the SoMa community where the new retail space would be located. The finalists include:

Rize Up Bakery, founded by Azikiwee Anderson, is a fledgling San Francisco based Black-owned bakery focused on reinventing and rethinking the traditional sourdough. Anderson has scaled his business and recently opened a new commercial kitchen space in Fisherman’s Wharf, and is looking to the Rising Entrepreneur opportunity to establish his first owned brick-and-mortar location.

Calaca Coffee was founded by Bay Area Natives Christian Soto and José Rodriguez with a passion for food and an interest for mixing all the flavors and cultures they were surrounded by in their hometown of San Francisco. They took over an abandoned lot in Crockett, CA and converted it into the Bay Area’s first Latino-owned coffee garden space. The contest will give them the ability to operate year-round (regardless of weather) and amplify their brand.

Soto and Rodriguez are true hustlers who are excited for the opportunity to expand their small business. “We’re not new to being a big fish in a small pond and going against the current. We started Calaca Coffee at the height of the pandemic, and have already been featured in a variety of press, from The San Francisco Chronicle to Eater SF, and were invited to be a vendor at the SF Coffee Festival, all before our one-year anniversary. The Rising Entrepreneur contest will help us open our first brick-and-mortar location in our home town, and with Raydiant’s POS-powered digital signage, we’ll be able to experiment with an ever-changing menu, and really bring our brand to life.”

The Uncreamery, founded by Lisa Myaf and Mark Charette, is San Francisco’s first vegan creamery that makes shockingly delicious vegan cheeses that slice, shred and melt like their dairy counterparts. A participant of La Cocina’s incubator kitchen nonprofit working to solve problems of equity in business ownership for women, immigrants and people of color, The Uncreamery has grown to offer their vegan cheese products across a variety of Bay Area grocery and retail outlets, as well as nationwide specialty shops and online retailers. Lisa and Mark’s cheeses won the hearts of many customers, including celebrities such as Brie Larson and Tabitha Brown. Raydiant’s offering will offer Lisa and Mark their first dedicated brick-and-mortar space for San Francisco‘ s first and only Vegan Deli and Cheese Shop, which will provide the opportunity for other small artisanal brands to be represented along their wonderful plant-based offerings. While the vegan market is heavily dominated by big name brands, it is small artisanal producers that bring innovation, unmatched quality and utmost care for their product to the table.

Whack Donuts, founded by San Francisco-native Vandor Hill, is a vegan doughnut bakery trying to flip the stigma that making vegan pastry without animal products, like eggs, can’t be delicious – and so far, he’s winning over both vegans and non-vegans alike. Hill has scaled his footprint by popping up across the Bay, from coffee shops to public markets to other vegan eateries (like Oakland’s Malibu’s Burgers), being featured in SFGATE and VegOutSF‘s best spots for vegan donuts, and is ready to take the next step in his entrepreneurial journey by opening his own dedicated brick-and-mortar space.

Hill shares, “A lot of people were like, ‘Oh, I had something vegan and it was disgusting’ – I’m trying to kill that stigma. Once people find out that my doughnuts are vegan, they honestly can’t tell the difference.’” Whack Donuts has recently partnered with Pastel to expand through delivery services across the Bay Area.

Kiss My Boba is a Tongan-owned family business started by husband-and-wife team Chelsea and Willy Tatola. The Tatolas were so passionate about their product that they decided to buy their own food truck so they could drive around and bring Bay Area residents joy via a cold cuppa tea. They’ve now expanded to Off the Grid, other public markets, launched a catering offering, and most recently, opened their first brick-and-mortar location in San Bruno at 221 El Camino Real. The Rising Entrepreneur contest will give them the opportunity to continue spreading the boba tea love through San Francisco with a dedicated location in SoMa.

“We were overwhelmed by the volume of applications we received for our Rising Entrepreneur contest,” shares Bobby Marhamat, CEO at Raydiant. “We’re feeling really good about our five finalists and know it will be a tough choice come Friday! They’re all incredibly talented, passionate, hungry, and ready for this next exciting chapter in their entrepreneurial journey.” Marhamat will serve as a judge alongside a panel of industry experts, including Akash Kapoor, CEO and Founder of Curry Up Now, and Danny Stoller, CEO and Co-founder of Square Pie Guys. Finalists will give a 10-minute pitch covering their journey, passion for the concept, vision for the retail space, and how they will continue to cultivate community in their new SoMa/South Park neighborhood.

The Rising Entrepreneur contest prize is valued at over $50,000. The package includes up to a 12-month commercial retail lease at Raydiant’s HQ, 35 Stillman Street, a busy SoMa side street near the Giants stadium and South Park. Raydiant will cover costs associated with the structural build out and work with the chosen entrepreneur to design the layout and aesthetic to their liking. Raydiant will offer the winner a $10,000 stipend to be used towards marketing and operational expenses to get their business up and running, and outfit their retail space with Raydiant-powered tech and digital signage. Raydiant’s platform will empower the chosen retailer to display digital menus, integrate with POS systems, and even power contactless check-out experiences.   

Once a winner is chosen, Raydiant will kick off construction and build out with plans for the retail space to be open to the public by July 1, 2022.

About Raydiant 
Raydiant is the AI-powered, in-store experience management platform of choice for the world’s largest brands in restaurant, retail, banking and more. With Raydiant, franchise managers, IT, marketing and communications executives can more effectively scale their brick-and-mortar operations, reduce anxiety from outdated technology oversight, and seamlessly create more engaging and personalized in-store experiences that keeps customers coming back and buying more. Raydiant works with nearly 4,500 brands, from SMB to enterprise, including First Bank, Dickey’s BBQ, Harvard University, The Salvation Army, Red Bull, Chick-Fil-A, Thomson Reuters, and Wahlburgers. Founded in April 2017, Raydiant is headquartered in San Francisco, California and has raised a total of $50 million from 8VC, Atomic Ventures, Lerer Hippeau, Mark Wahlberg Investments, Bloomberg Beta, Gaingels, Illuminate Ventures, Transmedia Capital, and Ron Conway. To learn more, visit www.raydiant.com.

Media Contact:
Morgan Chaney, VP of Marketing at Raydiant
[email protected] 

SOURCE Raydiant

Article source: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/raydiant-announces-five-bay-area-entrepreneurs-as-finalists-for-rising-entrepreneur-50k-real-estate-contest-301523925.html

While most of its property holdings in California are located in the Los Angeles and San Diego areas, as the Real Deal reported, the planned sell-off may also affect its malls in the Bay Area — most notably the Westfield San Francisco Centre in downtown San Francisco. The proposal to reduce Westfield’s U.S. footprint has been in the works since 2021, but is set to be “executed” in 2022 and 2023, a company press release said. It’s a rapid reversal from just five years ago, when the French real estate firm bought the entire chain of Westfield malls for nearly $16 billion. 

But unlike many other Westfield properties in Unibail’s portfolio, the high-end San Francisco mall — which houses key department stores like Nordstrom and Bloomingdale’s as well as San Francisco State University’s downtown campus — is co-owned by the New York-based retail estate firm Brookfield Properties. (A spokesperson for Brookfield did not respond to multiple requests for comment from SFGATE.)

David Greensfelder, a San Francisco-based retail real estate planner and consultant, told SFGATE that the mall will not suffer the fate of many other malls in the country, though changes to the mall will likely be inevitable.

“San Francisco Centre is this incredibly unique piece of property that anchors the other end of Powell Street,” he said. “It is extremely high-profile. It’s got excellent tenants in it. It’s it’s in the path of travel, which I think is very important. And so, I don’t see San Francisco Centre being at risk, but I do think that whoever buys it is going to have probably a greater opportunity to be able to put their fingerprints on the property more quickly.”

With the pandemic hitting San Francisco’s retail industry harder than in most places due to the pandemic and its effects on tourism and commerce, he said, it could be a while before Westfield San Francisco Centre — and Union Square at large — recovers back to its former glory. New ownership mall, he added, could result in a different slate of retail tenants, or even an expansion of its hospitality or residential components.  

Another Westfield property, the Westfield Valley Fair in Santa Clara is solely owned by Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield, and will likely be affected by this proposal. But Greensfelder says that the mall, which is the highest-grossing mall in Northern California, is arguably an easy sell for a prospective “blue-chip mall owner.”

With its recent $1 billion expansion and slew of tenants moving in during the pandemic, the mall is a hot commodity.

“The pandemic has had a much greater impact on the retail ecosystem in San Francisco than it has, for example, on Valley Fair, which, while it hasn’t been business as usual, has not seen its customer base really undermined in the same way,” Greensfelder said.

(The Metreon, also in downtown San Francisco, is managed but not owned by Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield.)

Already, Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield has sold off a Woodland Hills mall for $150 million to Los Angeles Rams owner Stan Kroenke. That mall, the Promenade, could be turned into a practice facility, the Los Angeles Times reported. 

But San Francisco Centre or Valley Fair, which are both malls sitting on “absolutely irreplaceable” real estate, will survive — even if the retail industry continues to shrink, Greensfelder says, due to the pandemic and the growth of online and subscription sales.

A spokesperson for Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield, Westfield’s parent company, declined to comment to SFGATE.

We all know it takes a lot of money to own or rent in the Bay Area, but a new survey is showing an eye-opening detail of just how financially painful it can be. 

Real estate agent Michael Bellings has a San Francisco unit priced at $1.5 million and expects it to sell in a matter of days.

“The median price for condos in San Francisco is $1.25 million, and for single family homes it’s $1.75 million,” he said.

A new study by the UC Berkeley Terner Center for Housing Innovation said more and more homes in much of the Bay Area are becoming out of reach for the middle class, defined as those making between $80,000 to $165,000 per year.

“In San Francisco you have to make upwards of $200,000 to afford a home in the lower segment of the housing market and these are supposed to be starter homes,” said David Garcia of the Terner Center for Housing.

Local

The Terner Center report said that in 2010, 47% of the homes for sale were affordable to members of the middle class. In 2019, that dropped to 24%.

In Alameda and Santa Clara counties, the decline is even steeper. In 2010, 64% of the middle class could afford a home. In 2019, that’s down to about 30% n those counties.

“We have seen wage growth go up 23% in 10 years,” said Garcia. “But that pales in comparison to home prices which rose 180%.”

The study shows it’s getting tougher for renters too. Roughly half of Bay Area renters are spending a higher portion of their earnings on housing in 2019 than in 2010. 

“It might be time to start thinking of something else potentially if I ever want to buy a house,” said San Francisco renter Karli Grigsby.

But there is hope for some house hunters, if you can be patient and flexible.

Article source: https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/making-it-in-the-bay/middle-class-being-priced-out-of-bay-area-housing-market-report/2855193/

MISSOULA – Missoula’s housing crisis is now making national headlines as the median home price surpasses $500,000.

A recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle takes a look at the data changes over the pandemic and found Missoula at the top of the list of cities with the biggest changes in home value and inventory.

Reporter Kellie Hwang said people are looking for more remote areas, “whether it’s living close to water, or the mountains, or the forest, I think there is that desire to increase your quality of life.”

The San Francisco based journalist told MTN News the Bay Area has long been one of the most expensive places to buy a home in the country, “there’s not a lot of new housing, there’s some pretty restrictive zoning laws, just a lot of history here that’s made it difficult.”

And now something we’ve heard anecdotally is proving true — Missoula’s housing market is matching San Francisco’s. A recent report by Hwang looked at 10 metro areas that saw the most drastic changes over the pandemic.

“Missoula, out of the entire list, just had the most extreme values,” she said. “This is all according to Zillow data.”

Hwang’s report in the Chronicle shows Missoula had the most extreme changes in the country in home values and inventory. Between January 2020 to January 2022, the cost of a home in Missoula shot up 57%. Inventory declined 58%. Missoula also had some of the lowest inventory per capita, with about 1.4 homes per 1,000 people on average.

Robert Sonora with the University of Montana says the challenges may continue, “it’s going to be an interesting few years, I think.”

“If that migration pattern keeps up, it’s going to become more and more difficult for people with in-state incomes to buy perhaps the home they like,” Sonora continued.

Sonora said something to keep an eye on, will be the lasting economic impacts, “if I have to spend more on my house, now suddenly I can’t, I don’t know, go out for dinner, so it starts bleeding into other sectors as well.”

And it’s hard to predict when or if the trends will reverse.

“If I’ve learned anything in the past couple of years, it’s not to expect anything, especially with the housing market,” Hwang said.

There’s a sliver of hope for renters with vacancy rates actually improving, according to reporting by our news partners, the Missoula Current. The rental vacancy has hovered near zero for years now, but a recent report by Sterling Commercial Real Estate shows that figure is now 2.6%.

Missoula’s housing market has paved the way for scam artists to try to bilk would-be tenants out of thousands of dollars in first-month rent, deposits, and other items.

Some red flags you should be aware of from scammers:

• If they waive all application fees and want you to send money ASAP via Paypal, Venmo or preloaded gift cards.
• If they only communicate with you via text or email.
• Landlords can’t give you names of local businesses they use for home repairs.
• If it sounds too good to be true…..it probably is a scam.

We also looked at the prices of houses and condominiums in Gallatin County where the median price in February for a single-family home was a staggering $896,000, marking a year-to-year increase of almost 49%.

Those are high prices for sure, but that’s if you can even find a house to buy, with inventory down a little more than 26%. Numbers out from the Gallatin Association of REALTORS show houses spent 37 days on the market on average.

Meanwhile, the price for a condo jumped a little more than 85% to $657,500.

Article source: https://www.kpax.com/news/missoula-county/is-missoula-the-next-san-francisco

The California Housing Speculation Act — AB1771 — was recently introduced by Assembly Member Chris Ward, D-San Diego, would tax house flippers 25% of their windfall if homes are sold within three years of purchase. I am sure that the powerful real estate lobby will fight it tooth and nail. The rest of us need to lobby just as hard in support of it.

Al Sandine, Kensington

Don’t ruin the view

Regarding “Will proposed tower spoil Telegraph Hill?” (Front Page, April 6): During a golden sunset, I once came upon a crowd of tourists gaping at Telegraph Hill from atop the crooked street at Lombard and Hyde. Wow! Yea! What a world-class vista with tiny houses zigzagging up to Coit Tower.

Like Florence, Venice, Santorini, Paris and top world destinations, San Francisco’s iconic Telegraph Hill has survived by historical happenstance, luck and a bit of citizen activism. Otherwise, the hill would have been flattened by quarries or wrapped with freeways, bridges and skyscrapers by the 1970s.

San Francisco’s northeast neighborhoods are densely populated yet remain irresistible lures for more luxury development — due to their beauty, bohemian diversity and million-dollar views.

Like our predecessors, caution and vigilance are worthy traits, particularly for wise city planning and urban design. It’s best not to over stuff the golden goose, less we lose the golden qualities that we love.

Howard Wong, San Francisco

Live within the rules

Regarding “What not to do in the Tenderloin” (Open Forum, April 5): Oh, how I wanted to believe the authors but soon realized they were just throwing red meat to those who believe living in a civil society means you can do whatever the hell you want.

Equating efforts to house people with “shuttling” them? Supervision and rules in shelters as “harassment”? Full rights with no responsibilities as “freedom”? And tying homelessness to substance abuse and mental illness as a “conflation”?

Like a raw Tenderloin steak, these notions are far from being cooked. They are not even warm.

Paul Svedersky, San Francisco

Offer solutions for S.F.

Regarding “What not to do in the Tenderloin” (Open Forum, April 5): This is an outstanding piece. I would like to see a sequel: “What to do in the Tenderloin” by the same authors.

Mark Levine, El Cerrito

Can the recycling system

Regarding “S.F. recycling program draws ire of advocacy groups” (Bay Area Business, April 5): I want to commend the consultants who came up with our absolutely ingenious new recycling system for cans and bottles, and the city employees who approved it.

Stores have never liked us hauling in our wine boxes full of empties, counting the bottles and giving us our money on the spot. So now instead of paying us, we pay them to buy the only acceptable bags to put cans in. And since we can’t squash cans anymore, we have to have more bags than usual for the same number of cans.

Here’s the best part: Since the bags are taken someplace else to open and count, your reusable bags are no longer reusable — you go to the store and buy more. Brilliant, just brilliant!

Susan Spellmam, San Francisco