Commercial real estate end-user pricing.

A May 26, 2025, CBC News article, "Metro Vancouver non-profit thrift stores say they're facing tough times as rents continue to rise," reports that "operators of non-profit thrift stores in Metro Vancouver say the region's expensive real estate market is making it difficult for them to make money, and that's keeping them from being able to help their communities."

The monthly rent one thrift store is paying has quadrupled since it opened 12 years ago. (How much of that increase has occurred in recent years is not reported.) That on another has tripled in seven.

According to Google search:

In British Columbia, some prominent commercial real estate holders include CBRE, Cushman & Wakefield, and Colliers. Other notable firms include Newmark, Marcus & Millichap, Avison Young, and Lee & Associates Commercial Real Estate Services.

CBRE is a global leader in commercial real estate known for its extensive portfolio and services in various aspects of the industry.

Cushman & Wakefield, another major player, provides a range of commercial real estate services, including investment, property management, and brokerage.

Colliers, a Canadian-based firm, has a strong presence in the Canadian market, offering services in investment, brokerage, and advisory.

Other notable firms, Newmark, Marcus & Millichap, Avison Young, and Lee & Associates, also hold significant positions in the BC commercial real estate landscape.

These firms are often involved in the ownership, management, and development of various commercial properties in BC, including office buildings, retail centers, and industrial facilities.

Neoliberal ideologue Andrey Pavlov, a finance professor at Simon Fraser University's Beedie School of Business quoted in the CBC News article, is of the opinion that to reduce commercial real estate prices – like those of residential real estate (aka "housing"), both of which are inflated beyond all mortals' grasp – "we" need to "build a lot more than we currently have."

A competent academic, and a real journalistic enterprise, would investigate monopoly pricing in the commercial real estate sector as giant holders acting as a cartel buy out small operators and accumulate adjacent parcels for future mega-development (aka "blockbusting"), and at the very least collect vacancy data as small customer-facing businesses are priced out of big rent-seekers' holdings and entire city blocks are shuttered.

Explaining in terms of a "shortage of supply" small businesses being run off the street by enormous hoards of capital is an exercise in navel-gazing. Mr. Pavlov needs to get out more and observe how financialization actually works in the real world; and CBC News needs to find real economists to talk to and stop cramming factually inaccurate oversimplifications of FIRE-sector parasitism as benign manifestations of the passive mechanics of "supply and demand" down its readers' throats.