The meanings of autumn: leaves turning beautiful colors, temperatures cooling, and … pumpkin spice lattes at Starbucks (and almost everywhere else in the coffee universe).

Yes, PSL, the official nickname, is coming back this week. But devotee or not, people in CRE might ask if they should pay some attention to it. Anything that brings many consumers in to buy for such a long stretch — PSL turns 20 this year — would seem to mean more foot traffic, which might improve surrounding retail performance.

Web data scraping company ScrapeHero pulled together some data about 16,061 Starbucks locations in the U.S. Moody's Analytics put that together with 2023 Q2 vacancy rates and Q2 quarter-over-quarter asking rents and said that "it would be very difficult to conclude that there is a relationship between the number of Starbucks locations and rent performance with only Las Vegas and Seattle beating the national average."