Company that puts ads on airport bins to expand

Hoping to deliver advertising to more affluent air passengers, a company that puts ads on the plastic bins that hold the belongings of fliers at airport security checkpoint plans to expand its operations.

SecurityPoint Media of St. Petersburg, Fla., now supplies plastic bins — plastered with ads — for 30 airports across the country, including Los Angeles, Ontario and San Diego international airports and John Wayne Airport. The ads reach an estimated 1.2 million travelers per day, according to company officials.

The company announced last week that it had joined with a venture capital group and a sales consulting firm — two subsidiaries of the Raptor Group, a Boston-based financial services firm — to expand its bin business to airports domestically and globally.

SecurityPoint Media founder and Chief Executive Officer Joseph Ambrefe Jr., said he hopes the partnership will help his company expand to 30 new airports in the next 12 months, including airports in Canada and Europe.

“This is an opportunity to really build out our media network,” he said.

Airline travelers are a valued target for advertisers because they are more likely to have an annual household income of $50,000 or more and are likely to shop for designer clothes, luxury cars and high-tech digital devices, according to a study by Arbitron Inc.

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-- Hugo Martin

Photo credit: SecurityPoint Media

Spending on business travel expected to slow in 2012

 

While spending on business travel has surged this year, anxiety over an uncertain economic climate is expected to slow travel spending in 2012.

That is the forecast from the Global Business Travel Assn., a Virginia-based trade group for business travel professionals. The group estimates that spending on business travel in the U.S. will be up 6.9% this year over 2010, hitting $250.2 billion.

But the trade group predicts that a tentative economy next year will slow the spending trend, leading to a growth of 4.3% over this year, to $260.9 billion.

The one bright spot in the forecast is the continued growth in spending for international travel, which the group said should grow by 7.7% in 2012 to $34.3 billion.

“While international trips are more expensive and time consuming, their reward can be worth every cent,” said Michael W. McCormick, executive director of the association.

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-- Hugo Martin

Photo: Passengers walk to the terminal at Bob Hope Airport in Burbank. Credit: Los Angeles Times

Luxury student housing complex near USC sold to investors

A new luxury student housing complex outside of USC called West 27th Place was purchased by New York investment manager Kayne Anderson Real Estate Advisors.

The seven-story, 161-unit complex at Figueroa and 27th streets is decidedly up-market, with such amenities as a 24-hour fitness center, billiards, a hot tub, barbecues and a resort-style pool with a sun deck and cabanas. Ground floor businesses will include restaurants.

Selling the complex, which opened this fall, was a joint venture of Los Angeles developers CityView and Symphony Development, real estate brokerage Institutional Property Advisors said. The price was not disclosed but downtown property experts predicted it would sell for about $60 million.

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-- Roger Vincent

Photo: West 27th Place. Credit: CityView

Historic United Artists building sold in downtown Los Angeles

A storied Los Angeles theater and office complex built by silent film stars that was later owned by one of the city’s most popular televangelists has been purchased by East Coast investors.

The historic United Artists building at Broadway and Ninth Street in downtown Los Angeles was sold by Wescott Christian Center Inc. to Greenfield Partners for $11 million.

Greenfield, a prominent hotel investor, hasn’t revealed its plans for the property that once sported neon signs proclaiming “Jesus Saves.” Representatives of the South Norwalk, Conn., company did not respond to requests for comment.

Silent film stars Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin were among the founders of United Artists, a movie production company. Pickford, known as “America’s Sweetheart,” posed at the controls of a steam shovel in early 1927 to call attention to the groundbreaking for the United Artists Building, a 13-story movie palace and office complex at 927 S. Broadway.

Construction was rushed with three shifts of workers building around the clock to get the Spanish Gothic-style building done in time for the premiere of Pickford’s film “My Best Girl” just after Christmas. Searchlights were expected to attract a crowd of 100,000 people, who would hear the ceremony from loudspeakers set up on surrounding blocks as far away as Seventh Street, The Times reported. The National Guard was called out in advance to maintain order.

The structure was purchased in 1986 by Glendale-based Westcott Christian Center. One of its founders was Gene Scott, a flamboyant preacher whose broadcasts were heard nationally. He died in 2005.

Downtown Los Angeles has enjoyed a renaissance in the last decade, and some improvements such as condominiums, bars and restaurants have come to the blocks around Broadway and Olympic Boulevard near the United Artists building.

“That area is already starting to form a bona fide neighborhood,” said downtown advocate and blogger Brigham Yen. “Broadway is the most architecturally significant street in downtown L.A., if not all of Los Angeles County."

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-- Roger Vincent

Photo: United Artists Building Credit: Wikipedia Commons

Scam watch: Child identity theft, credit repair, investments

Here is a roundup of alleged cons, frauds and schemes to watch out for.

Child identity theft –- Scammers have increasingly been using children’s social security numbers to steal their identities and establish fraudulent credit cards and loans, the Better Business Bureau said in a recent bulletin. In one instance, a 17-year-old girl’s personal information was used to run up $725,000 in fraudulent debt, much of which had gone into collection, the group said. Parents should encourage children to keep their personal information secure, according to Carrie A. Hurt, president of a Better Business Bureau office that serves central, coastal and southwest Texas. Anyone concerned about their children’s credit can run a check with one of the large credit-reporting agencies.

Credit repair operators –- The Federal Trade Commission has filed a lawsuit accusing operators of a credit-repair company in Texas of unlawfully charging fees before performing services. The lawsuit against RMCN Credit Services Inc. is part of a continuing crackdown on credit-repair companies that prey on people with financial problems, the FTC said in a news release. RMCN charged a retainer fee of up to $2,000, violating a federal law the requires such agencies to collect fees without performing any services. 

Investment fraud –- A man who stole “at least $1 million” from investors has pleaded guilty to wire fraud and tax evasion, federal prosecutors in New Jersey said. Robert Schroy, who lived alternately in Illinois and California, told investors he would use their money in “international bank trade” but actually spent much of it on personal expenses, including cars, vacations and dining, the U.S. attorney’s office in Trenton, N.J., said in a news release. Schroy and his unidentified partners promised investors extraordinary gains -– ranging from 10% to 100% per week for 25 weeks, plus the return of their original investments. But he never invested the money, prosecutors said. The charges carry a maximum sentence of 25 years in federal prison.

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-- Stuart Pfeifer

 

Retail roundup: Target, Liz Claiborne and JCPenney, retail sales

-- Target is planning to hire more than 92,000 temporary workers this holiday season, and it's testing a new program that allows interested job applicants to text the retailer from their cellphones to get information about the positions. The move is intended to "make it easier and more convenient" for job seekers, Target spokesman Eddie Baeb said. 

Half a dozen Los Angeles-area Targets are participating in the text program, including stores in Compton, Corona and San Bernardino. 

-- J.C. Penney Co. said it had reached an agreement to acquire the Liz Claiborne family of brands as well as the U.S. and Puerto Rico rights for the fashion jewelry brand Monet for $267.5 million.

The department store chain has been the exclusive licensee for all Liz Claiborne and Claiborne-branded merchandise in the U.S. and Puerto Rico since August of last year. 

"The brands we are acquiring hold tremendous appeal for our customers, and the performance of the Liz Claiborne and Monet brands at J.C. Penney has consistently exceeded our high expectations," Chief Executive Myron E. Ullman III said in a statement. 

-- U.S. retail and food services sales rose 1.1% to $395.5 billion in September from August, the largest gain in seven months, the Department of Commerce said. Sales were up 7.9% when compared with September 2010. 

That's a bit of good news as the nation heads into the all-important holiday season; retail groups have been estimating that holiday sales will rise a modest 2% to 3% for the November-December period.

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-- Andrea Chang

Photo: A Target store in Culver City. Credit: Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times

Podcast: Insider Trading, Job Creation and Fighting Cancer

A federal judge in Manhattan this week imposed the longest insider-trading sentence ever in the United States.

In a conversation on the new Weekend Business podcast, Peter Lattman, who covered the sentencing of the hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam in the case, says the government argues that it will have a powerful deterrent effect.

Mr. Lattman said that it contrasts, however, with a comparative lack of prosecutions, convictions and long sentences for executives whose firms may share responsibility for the financial crisis that began in 2007.

In a separate conversation, Robert Shiller, the Yale economics professor, discusses the argument he makes in the Economic View column in Sunday Business that the government should put people to work in large-scale infrastructure projects. The proposal was included in President Obama’s American Jobs Act, which was blocked at least in its full form by the Senate last week.

Natasha Singer talks to David Gillen in the podcast about her Sunday Business cover article on the “pinking of America” — the rise of a marketing powerhouse in the fight against breast cancer.

And Steve Lohr discusses the importance of default choices on the Internet and in other parts of contemporary life. As he says in the Unboxed column in Sunday Business, much of the Internet is wide open, but the design of Web sites and the order of Web searches helps to determine what consumers actually see and select.

In the news portion of the podcast, I discuss the Nobel prize in economics, which has been labeled a “Non-Keynesian Nobel.” In my Strategies column in Sunday Business, Professor Christopher Sims of Princeton, one of the new Nobel laureates, makes it clear that he actually places his research within the Keynesian tradition.

You can find specific segments of the podcast at these junctures: the insider trading case (30:23); news headlines (23:50); fighting breast cancer (21:23); Robert Shiller (11:55); designing for the Web (7:36); the week ahead (1:48).

You can download the program by subscribing from The New York Times’s podcast page or directly from iTunes.