Finance & Commerce: Four Seasons Realtor Shares Downtown Optimism

Cindy recently joined JD Duggan from Finance & Commerce to discuss downtown Minneapolis. Please read the full article and interview below.

Cynthia Froid is passionate about downtown.

She’s been a real estate agent focused on downtown Minneapolis for about 26 years and is currently selling the Four Seasons condominiums in the RBC Gateway Tower.

She’s seen how the area has changed from a “dismal” collection of surface parking lots to a thriving destination in the middle of the city with theaters, stadiums and iconic restaurants.

“It’s a wonderful place to live and to work,” Froid said.

That’s not to say downtown hasn’t had its challenges, but Froid is watching how big names are infusing massive funds into the heart of the city, which she says will be a catalyst for even more investment to keep downtown on an upward trajectory. Offices are filling up and shows are back on. Now she hopes to see new developers meeting the competition of world-class cities and bringing new and bold architecture into the urban core.

Froid spoke with Finance & Commerce about her optimism for downtown and the changing dynamics of the area.

*this interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

minneapolis - and downtown specifically - there’s been some bad press over the years. But that’s obviously not the full story of the area. have you had any trouble selling four seasons condos?

So Four Seasons is the biggest project I’ve ever worked on. We’re representing United Properties on that building, selling just the private residences on top. It is a location that has really never had residential, it’s kitty corner from Whole Foods on the magical corner of Hennepin, Washington and Nicollet. That’s been a vacant parcel, actually, for about 30 years. So that was a bit of a sketchy block, to be honest, for decades. And now with the arrival of the Gateway building and Four Seasons, it really has changed a lot in that quadrant. And I think just linking North Loop with the riverfront and Mill District and the business district, it’s really filling this void and has provided this missing link after all these years. So having certainly RBC as the anchor tenant in the office building, plus the hotel, Gavin Kaysen’s restaurant Mara, and then the private residences, it has brought just this new life to the neighborhood, really creating a neighborhood, actually, that had never been there.

how have you seen the dynamics change downtown?

Look at the North Loop. I mean, all the restaurants that are opening now. Obviously, it was sad to see some of our neighborhood institutions close. But, with that comes this rebirth. And that’s what we’re seeing now, a lot of developers, a lot of small business owners, restauranteurs, taking the leap and investing hugely into these neighborhoods downtown. And we need that. We need these business leaders to step up.

It’s everything. It’s the commercial, it’s the retail and the residential, and you can’t have one without the other. They all depend on each other. So I really commend these business leaders for really putting themselves out there and investing with capital and getting other people to join them.

One thing that I think has been so interesting is the residents who are choosing to live downtown. I think there’s been a lot of negative press. especially, around the time of COVID, about people fleeing downtown for the suburbs. You heard that in New York City and Seattle and Portland and Chicago as well. But we did not see that. I think we the suburbs, as you see in Manhattan right now, going on in Brooklyn, they’re coming back, they’re trying to get back to the city, because they’re missing the lifestyle they had and now they’re priced out.

can you expand on the demographics of who wants to live downtown right now?

I always refer to this barbell effect. We’ve got younger, like millennials on one end of the barbell. And then on the other end of the barbell, we have baby boomers, empty nesters. And we see a lot of multi-generational purchasers downtown.

We also see another segment of the population who maybe are purchasing something downtown, as their “urban cabin”. We’ve got people - look at Rochester, for example - we’ve got a lot of people affiliated with the Mayo system, they live and work in Rochester, but they want to have a weekend place where they can go to great restaurants and games and theater and explore the lakes and things of that nature. So that’s a really fun segment to think about. In addition, of course, to our relocation demographic, people coming in for work from out of state. They’re transferring here with various companies and they’re choosing to live here and it never fails. We meet people that say, ‘I only plan to be in Minneapolis for a year or two and I’ve been here 10 years’.

what are your expectations for the future of downtown considering all this investment we’ve talked about and all these changes?

I’m in the eternal optimist. And of course, I’m probably biased and my livelihood depends on it, as do many others. But I am very optimistic on downtown, I think we’ve really turned a corner. All the businesses that are popping up since COVID. And the investment that’s going on and the big visions, I think, will be really what carries us here over the next few decades. When you look at how this city has changed over the past 20 years, in a lot of ways, it’s just completely evolved. When I first started selling real estate downtown in the late ‘90s, there was no Guthrie Theater, there was no downtown library, there wasn’t even a Target Field. It was just all surface level parking and frankly, kind of a dismal place with some sketchy neighborhoods. I think it’s only improved over the past couple of decades. That will continue. And honestly, I think that major contributions to the city like the Four Seasons, RBC gateway, like US Bank Stadium, and everything that has happened around US Bank and other places like that. I think those are true catalysts for other great projects, both commercial, retail and residential to follow. A lot of developers have their eye on the city. And they’re seeing what our local developers are doing.