The United States Postal Service is considering consolidation options in every major metropolitan market in the United States. The consolidations could lead to the closure of over 3,000 USPS locations. Clearly, this will have a major impact on the employment of a large number of postal workers. These abandoned post offices will also leave many [...]
Here is an email I received last night from Sun Exchange Properties. This is the first time I’ve seen an offer like this.
So $100,000 buys you $130,000 in equity? I’d offer this deal too if I were Sun Exchange since the investor still gets the short end of the stick if the CAP Rate [...]
Press release from the NPD Group. Presented without comment.
NPD Spring 2009 Restaurant Count Shows Units Down by 4,000
Chicago, July 27, 2009 – There are 4,000 fewer restaurants in the United States this spring than there were last spring, according to The NPD Group, a leading market research company. NPD’s Spring 2009 ReCount®, which is a [...]
Retail News Blog put up good post this morning titled Capitalization Rates Without Market Activity which addresses the problem in the marketplace of determining property values with little or no market data available. With fewer and fewer sale transactions taking place, appraisers are left in the dubious position of valuing property without comparable sales data. [...]
Kevin Kleen has a good post up today about the market stability of college towns. He references an article from The Creative Class which looks at unemployment rates in various cities. I’m going to stop short of saying that the article concludes that college towns are definitively recession-proof but I do believe the data offers [...]
Citing this article on Bloomberg, Paul Kedrosky, author of the blog Infectious Greed, takes a quick look at the current supply of vacant homes in the United States and runs a couple of calculations to put the U.S. housing oversupply in perspective. Sobering.
According to the latest data, the number of vacant U.S. homes touched 18.7-million [...]
There have been a handful of blog posts and various articles written about the curious decision of Standard & Poor’s to upgrade several commercial mortgage backed securities (CMBS) to a triple-A rating just one week after downgrading those same securities to junk or near-junk status of double-B and triple-B minus. What is interesting is that [...]
The Financial Times reported yesterday that Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo have issued warnings that the trouble in the commercial real estate industry continues to mount. Some key points from the FT article:
Morgan Stanley takes a $700 million CRE write-down in the 2nd quarter
3rd straight quarterly loss for Morgan Stanley
Wells Fargo states non-performing [...]
The following are exerpts from a report just issued today by CreditSights‘ REIT analyst Craig Guttenplan titled “REIT 2Q Fundamentals: Protracted Pain Despite Gain.”
From the report (emphasis mine):
Commercial real estate (CRE) fundamentals for the core domestic property types continued their downward progression during the second quarter. Vacancy rates rose and market rents declined on a [...]
This is an interesting chart. I don’t think it means these other countries don’t have problems but I do think it means our problems are significantly larger than most. The chart could also be used as a springboard for social commentary on the consumerist nature of Americans.
(HT – Zero Hedge)
