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Are you wondering how to invest in real estate in 2020? Each successful rental property investing decision begins with choosing the right US housing market. There are many factors which…

The spread of the novel coronavirus has intensified worldwide and is ripping through the tourism and hospitality industry. As a result, the demand for short-term rentals continues to dry up.…

Buying an income property can be a smart financial decision. If done right, one can get a good return through rental income, equity gains, and tax benefits. However, profitability is…

Chef Kevin Rathbun has closed his namesake restaurant and Krog Bar, both located inside The Stove Works in Inman Park.

First reported by Tomorrow’s News Today, Rathbun opened the dining spots back-to-back in 2004 and 2005 before the arrival of the Atlanta BeltLine’s Eastside Trail. He opened Rathbun’s Steak a short walk down the BeltLine in 2007.

In a report in the AJC, Rathbun said the closure was not COVID-19 related, but an inability to reach a lease agreement with Asana, the company that owns both The Stove Works and Krog Street Market.

Rathbun suggested that Asana plans to demolish part of The Stove Works to make room for parking for busy Krog Street Market located just across the street. INtown has been unable to confirm that statement with Asana.

Rathbun, who also owns KR Steakbar in Buckhead, said he is looking at reopening Krog Bar next to Rathbun’s Steak in the future.

The post Report: Chef Kevin Rathbun closes namesake restaurant and Krog Bar in Inman Park appeared first on Atlanta INtown Paper.

Fulton County Early Voting for the Presidential Preference Primary, General Primary, and Special Election will take place weekdays beginning Monday, May 18, through Friday, June 5, from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and Saturday, May 30 from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Polls will be closed on Memorial Day, Monday, May 25. On all other dates, polls will open at the following locations:

Alpharetta Library
10 Park Plaza
Alpharetta, GA 30009

C.T. Martin Natatorium and Recreation Center
3201 Martin Luther King Jr. Drive SW
Atlanta, GA 30311

Garden Hills Elementary School Gymnasium
285 Sheridan Drive
Atlanta, GA 30305

Sandy Springs Library
395 Mount Vernon Hwy NE
Sandy Springs, GA 30328

South Fulton Service Center
5600 Stonewall Tell Road
College Park, GA 30349

Out of consideration for fellow voters and poll workers, voters are being asked to wear a face covering when voting in person. Those in line will also be asked to stand at least 6 feet apart from one another in accordance with social distancing recommendations. As Fulton County seeks to limit the total number of people inside each voting location, voters should expect longer lines than normal at polling locations and Fulton County Registration & Elections encourages voters to vote by mail if possible.

Some early voting locations will not be polling locations for the Presidential Preference Primary, General Primary, and Special Election on June 9, 2020. Please visit the Georgia Secretary of State’s My Voter Page at www.mvp.sos.ga.gov or Fulton County Registration & Elections at https://www.fultoncountyga.gov/inside-fulton-county/fulton-county-departments/registration-and-elections/find-my-polling-site for details on where voters are designated to cast ballots on Election Day.

The post Fulton County announces early voting locations appeared first on Atlanta INtown Paper.

Workato, the leading and fastest-growing enterprise automation platform, unveiled its first annual “State of Business Technology Report,” exploring the emergence of a new technology role within organizations, Business Technology, also called Business Applications or Business Systems. These are the people charged with rolling out apps, integrations, and automations in their companies. The rapidly growing field resides within IT and works with business teams——from finance, human resources, operations, and sales—to help impact initiatives through buying and managing applications, and integrating and automating workflows throughout them.

The roles in a business technology team are expected to encompass more than 15 million jobs by 2022*, supporting all business verticals. This job market growth is driven by the proliferation of SaaS applications and continual investment in Enterprise Software—the fastest growing spend in IT at a rate of 10.5 percent year over year. It is also driven by the need for organizations to drive transformation and innovation by aligning IT and business goals.

The report, conducted by Atomik Research, an independent market research company, includes responses from two separate surveys; the first of more than 100 full-time Business Technology leaders and the second of more than 300 HR, marketing, sales, finance, and support professionals, manager level and above in the United States. It officially defines the new role, highlights its influence on organizations, and uncovers challenges and barriers this job role faces to help organizations better support an area that is pivotal to their growth. Key findings include:

Business Technology Leaders Drive Productivity and Innovation
With the continued rise of SaaS applications, Business Technology leaders bring a holistic view of the company across individual functional departments.

94 percent of Business Technology respondents agree or strongly agree that Business Technology Teams are key changemakers and drivers of an organization’s productivity and innovation.

Existing Tools Are Slowing Down Business Transformation

82 percent of Business Technology Leaders report being backlogged with their projects with Finance being the biggest culprit at 71 percent, followed by Sales and HR.

44 percent indicate that tools at their disposal are slowing them down followed by tactical, day-to-day firefighting at 42 percent.

Job Frustrations, Challenges Evolving with New Role

91 percent of Business Technology respondents are frustrated with their role, citing the speed with which they are able to respond to Lines of Business demands as their number one frustration. 72 percent feel overworked.

Only 18 percent of Business Technology leaders feel “very appreciated” by their Lines Of Business colleagues.

40 percent are frustrated with their current integration/automation tool.

Business Technology and Lines of Business Aren’t Fully Aligned

Employee onboarding and offboarding is universally acknowledged as important.

Business Technology respondents cite “hire to retire” procedures for employee on-boarding and off-boarding as the most desired automations (37%).

Lines of Business respondents cite it as the second most desired (26%).

Lines of Business respondents identified Approval Workflows as their most desired automation, Business Technology rated it in the bottom three.

Procure to Pay is among the lowest desired automations for Lines Of Business but in the top 3 for Business Technology.

“The role of application support teams changes considerably when they become responsible for managing SaaS At Scale. Not only are they expected to add customized enhancements to individual applications but they’re also responsible for establishing integrations and automating workflows among dozens if not hundreds of SaaS services. This report provides unique insight into how Business Technology teams are stepping up to these new responsibilities,” said Mark Settle, 7-time CIO and author.

“There is a foundational shift happening in the role of IT, from providing infrastructure and provisioning hardware to working within business teams to optimize the systems and processes they rely on to help drive business impact,” said Vijay Tella, Co-Founder and CEO of Workato. “As a leader in enterprise automation, we are committed to supporting this movement and the Business Technology teams who are guiding their organizations through digital transformation.”

The April jobs report shows a staggering loss of 20.5 million jobs, which is the largest monthly loss in recorded history. Employment dramatically dropped across almost every industry. The unemployment rate jumped to 14.7 percent, the highest since the Great Depression. The unemployment rate underestimates the amount of slack currently in the labor market. 5.1 million additional workers are now working part-time even though they prefer a full-time job. And the number of people outside the labor force grew by 6.6 million, showing many are currently discouraged to even try to find a job. Over the coming months, we should expect participation to increase again as the economy begins to open up.

The jump in average hourly earnings is not very meaningful as it rose for the wrong reasons. Large layoffs of mostly low-paid workers raised the average pay, as was the case in the Great Recession.

Dramatic as they are, the top line numbers are not very telling for what’s ahead. It is obvious that when many businesses are shut down, and many workers are not allowed to go to work, unemployment rates will skyrocket. As the economy opens, millions of people will go back to work. From that perspective, the report offers a somewhat positive statistic: A large majority, 78 percent, of the unemployed are on temporary layoff.

The report shows that some demographic groups are much harder hit than others due to the layoffs thus far. While the overall unemployment rate increased by 11.2 percentage points between February and April, this increase was 12.8 for women, 14.5 for Hispanic people, 19.3 for those age 20-24 and 20.9 for those age 16-19.

Over the past 12 months, the overall unemployment rate increased by 11.1 percentage points. This increase was just 6.1 percentage points for management, professional and related occupations, versus a 23.1 percentage point increase for service occupations. While the labor market slack increased for all types of workers, it much more dramatically increased for those without a college degree. 

Marriott International, Inc. reported first quarter 2020 results, which were dramatically impacted by the COVID-19 global pandemic and efforts to contain it (COVID-19).

Arne M. Sorenson, president and chief executive officer of Marriott International, said, “In the last few months we have seen the impact of COVID-19 spread throughout our business in an unprecedented way.  Worldwide RevPAR¹ began the year with a strong 4.6 percent growth rate for January, excluding Greater China, where COVID-19 was already impacting results.  For the first two months of the year, worldwide RevPAR grew 3.2 percent, excluding the Asia Pacific region.  As the pandemic moved around the world, we saw global RevPAR fall sharply and, in April, worldwide RevPAR declined approximately 90 percent.  Currently, roughly a quarter of our worldwide hotels are closed.

“The resilience of travel demand is evident in the improving trends we see in Greater China.  Occupancy at our hotels in the region reached 25 percent in April, up from less than 10 percent in mid-February 2020.

“Looking at our occupancy and booking trends, it appears that lodging demand in most of the rest of the world has stabilized, albeit at very low levels.  Occupancy was around 20 percent over the past two weeks in North American limited-service hotels, benefitting from leisure and drive-to demand.

“As national, state and local restrictions around travel and business are gradually relaxed, we are preparing to welcome back our associates and guests.  A large, and very important, part of that process is addressing their health and safety concerns while on property.  To that end, we are rolling out a multi-pronged platform to elevate cleanliness standards and hospitality norms to respond to the new health and safety challenges presented by the current pandemic environment. 

“Hotel owners continue to show their preference for our brands.  Rooms signed during the quarter were in line with the year ago quarter, and our development pipeline grew slightly to nearly 516,000 rooms, with 45 percent under construction.  At the end of the first quarter, our rooms distribution around the world in 134 countries and territories had grown by 4.4 percent compared to one year prior.  While we expect COVID-19’s dramatic impact on the global economy will likely result in significantly lower new room openings than we had budgeted for 2020, we are already seeing an uptick in owner interest in discussing conversions to our brands.

“We have taken substantial steps to preserve liquidity and mitigate the impact of these extremely low levels of demand.  In addition to reducing our operating expenses dramatically, in mid-April we issued $1.6 billion of senior notes and, last week, we announced amendments to our existing co-brand credit card agreements with JPMorgan Chase & Co. and American Express, raising $920 million of additional liquidity.  We are confident we have sufficient resources to manage through this evolving situation.

“Our thoughts are with everyone who has been impacted by the pandemic.  These are extremely challenging times, but I am confident that we will be able to successfully navigate through them.”

First Quarter 2020 Results
Marriott’s reported operating income totaled $114 million in the 2020 first quarter, compared to 2019 first quarter reported operating income of $510 million.  Reported net income totaled $31 million in the 2020 first quarter, compared to 2019 first quarter reported net income of $375 million.  Reported diluted earnings per share (EPS) totaled $0.09 in the quarter, compared to reported diluted EPS of $1.09 in the year-ago quarter.  Reported results in the 2020 first quarter included impairment charges, bad debt expense, and guarantee reserves of $193 million pretax ($148 million after-tax and $0.45 per share), related to COVID-19.

Adjusted operating income in the 2020 first quarter totaled $192 million, compared to 2019 first quarter adjusted operating income of $655 million.  Adjusted operating income in the 2020 first quarter included impairment charges, bad debt expense, and guarantee reserves of $180 million, related to COVID-19.

First quarter 2020 adjusted net income totaled $85 million, compared to 2019 first quarter adjusted net income of $482 million.  Adjusted diluted EPS in the first quarter totaled $0.26, compared to adjusted diluted EPS of $1.41 in the year-ago quarter.  These 2020 first quarter adjusted results included impairment charges, bad debt expense, and guarantee reserves of $138 million after-tax ($0.42 per share), related to COVID-19.  Adjusted results exclude merger-related costs and (recoveries) charges, cost reimbursement revenue, and reimbursed expenses.  See page A-2 for the calculation of adjusted results.

Base management and franchise fees totaled $629 million in the 2020 first quarter, compared to base management and franchise fees of $732 million in the year-ago quarter.  The year-over-year decline in these fees is primarily attributable to RevPAR declines related to COVID-19, partially offset by unit growth and an increase in other non-RevPAR related franchise fees.  Other non-RevPAR related franchises fees in the 2020 first quarter increased $7 million compared to the year-ago quarter, largely due to an increase in residential branding fees.  Credit card branding fees were roughly flat year over year.

Marriott recognized no incentive management fees in the 2020 first quarter, compared to incentive management fees of $163 million in the year-ago quarter.  While many of the company’s managed hotels earned incentive management fees in the quarter under the terms of their contracts, no incentive fees were recognized under accounting standards due to the significant uncertainty created by COVID-19 as to the extent to which the company will be entitled to such fees on a full year basis.

Contract investment amortization for the 2020 first quarter totaled $25 million, compared to $14 million in the year-ago quarter.  The year-over-year change largely reflects impairments of investments in management and franchise contracts.

Owned, leased, and other revenue, net of direct expenses, totaled $8 million in the 2020 first quarter, compared to $50 million in the year-ago quarter.  Compared to the year-ago quarter, the decline in results is primarily attributable to RevPAR declines related to COVID-19.

Cost reimbursement revenue, net of reimbursed expenses totaled a loss of $80 million in the quarter, compared to a $136 million loss in the year-ago quarter.  The year-over-year improvement largely reflects the results of the loyalty program, which had lower marketing and redemption expenses.

Depreciation, amortization, and other expenses for the 2020 first quarter totaled $150 million, compared to $54 million in the year-ago quarter.  The year-over-year change largely reflects a $90 million impairment charge associated with several leased hotels in North America.

General, administrative, and other expenses for the 2020 first quarter totaled $270 million, compared to $222 million in the year-ago quarter.  Expenses in the 2020 first quarter include $65 million of bad debt expense due to higher projected loss rates and $14 million of guarantee reserves. 

In the 2020 first quarter, the company incurred $15 million of expenses and recognized $17 million of insurance recoveries related to the data security incident it disclosed on November 30, 2018.  The expenses and insurance recoveries are reflected in either the reimbursed expenses or merger-related costs and (recoveries) charges lines of the Income Statement, both of which have been excluded from all adjusted results. 

Adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) totaled $442 million in the 2020 first quarter, compared to first quarter 2019 adjusted EBITDA of $821 million.  First quarter 2020 adjusted EBITDA included $79 million of bad debt expense and guarantee reserves, related to COVID-19.  See page A-8 for the adjusted EBITDA calculation.

Selected Performance Information
The company added 88 new properties (14,525 rooms) to its worldwide lodging portfolio during the 2020 first quarter, including nearly 2,100 rooms converted from competitor brands and approximately 7,200 rooms in international markets.  Eighteen properties (3,670 rooms) exited the system during the quarter.  At quarter-end, Marriott’s global lodging system totaled more than 7,400 properties and timeshare resorts, with nearly 1,392,000 rooms.

At quarter-end, the company’s worldwide development pipeline totaled 3,035 properties with nearly 516,000 rooms, including 1,238 properties with over 230,000 rooms under construction and 149 properties with more than 24,000 rooms approved for development, but not yet subject to signed contracts.

In the 2020 first quarter, worldwide RevPAR declined 22.5 percent (a 22.7 percent decline using actual dollars).  North American RevPAR declined 19.5 percent (a 19.5 percent decline using actual dollars), and international RevPAR declined 30.4 percent (a 31.3 percent decline using actual dollars).

Balance Sheet and Liquidity
At quarter-end, Marriott’s total debt was $12.23 billion and cash balances totaled $1.76 billion, compared to $10.94 billion in debt and $225 million of cash at year-end 2019.

In April 2020, the company issued $1.6 billion of Series EE Senior Notes due in 2025 with a 5.75 percent interest rate coupon.  In early May, the company raised $920 million in additional liquidity through amendments to its co-brand credit card agreements with JPMorgan Chase & Co. and American Express. The company expects to use the net proceeds from these transactions for general corporate purposes, including paying near-term debt maturities.

As a result of the debt issuance and amendments to its co-brand credit card agreements, the company’s net liquidity has increased to approximately $4.3 billion as of May 8, representing roughly $3.9 billion in cash and cash equivalents, and $1.3 billion of unused borrowing capacity under its revolving credit facility, less $0.9 billion of commercial paper outstanding. 

The company repurchased 1.0 million shares of common stock in the 2020 first quarter for $150 million at an average price of $145.42 per share.  The company halted further share repurchases in February and suspended its quarterly dividend beginning in the second quarter.

Georgia gas prices  increased slightly at the pump compared to a week ago.  Georgia motorists are now paying an average price of $1.64 per gallon for regular unleaded gasoline. Monday’s state average is 3 cents more than a week ago, 8 cents less than last month, and $1.05 cents less than this time last year.

It now costs motorists $24.60 to fill a 15-gallon tank of gasoline; that is $16.50 less than what motorists paid in April of 2019, when pump prices hit their peak of $2.74 per gallon.

“As some states begin to re-open businesses, those states will likely see demand increase and pump prices will likely follow suit,” said Montrae Waiters, spokeswoman, AAA – The Auto Club Group. “Gas price fluctuation will continue across the country in coming weeks, especially as more states re-open and motorists begin driving more.”

Crude Oil

Since last Monday, the national average for a gallon of regular gasoline has increased by 6 cents to $1.84. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) released new data that showed demand for gasoline increased by 800,000 barrels a day to 6.7 million barrels a day last week, which is 3.2 million barrels a day less than last year at this time. The boost in demand continues to push pump prices up around the country, as more states re-open businesses. Gas demand is expected to continue to grow, leading pump prices to continue their ascent for the coming weeks.

At the close of Thursday’s formal trading session, WTI decreased by 44 cents to settle at $23.55 per barrel. Although crude prices took a slight back step, they are expected to gain some steam this week, as the market continues to believe that crude demand will increase as more states re-open businesses. However, global crude demand is expected to remain low due to COVID-19, tempering price increases.

 Regional Prices

Atlanta ($1.64)

Most expensive Georgia metro markets –Hinesville-Fort Stewart ($1.75), Savannah ($1.71) and Gainesville ($1.66).

Least expensive Georgia metro markets – Athens ($1.51), Rome ($1.52) and Warner Robins ($1.55).     

CURRENT AND PAST PRICE AVERAGES (Regular Unleaded Gasoline)    

	Sunday	Saturday	Week Ago	Month Ago	One Year Ago	2019 Low	2019 High	Record High
National	$1.84	$1.83	$1.78	$1.88	$2.87	$2.23 (January)	$2.90 (May)	$4.11   (7/17/2008)
Georgia	$1.64	$1.63	$1.61	$1.72	$2.69	$2.04 (January)	$2.74 (April)	$4.16   (9/15/2008)