Tweet 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 [...]
Tweet 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 [...]
Tweet 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®, [...]
Tweet 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 [...]
Tweet 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 [...]
Tweet 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 [...]
Tweet 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 [...]
Tweet 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 [...]
Tweet 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 [...]
Tweet 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)
Tweet Another email in my inbox today from CREOBA. The reason I think this is newsworthy is twofold. First is the predatory tagline of their upcoming dinner: “Is the commercial real estate market about to collapse?” The second is the fact their guest speaker is a residential auction specialist. Did I mention that I love [...]
Tweet From an email I received from the law firm of McKenna Long & Aldridge LLP: The Buyer’s Guide to Distressed Real Estate and Loans Important Legal and Business Considerations for Buyers of Distressed Real Estate and Loans Due to the current state of the real estate market, the capital markets, and the overall economy, [...]
Tweet I received an email from someone at the CCIM Institute this morning to let me know that others have been questioning the merits of the Commercial REO Brokers Association (CREOBA). Apparently several people have been wondering just what the CREOBA organization is and whether or not they have any credibility whatsoever. Since I found [...]
Tweet From Calculated Risk: “We’re dumbfounded. We’ve been working on this deal for four-and-a-half years. I don’t know how, all of a sudden, the numbers don’t work.” JMW Development Principal Mark Johnson From the Minneapolis / St. Paul Business Journal: SuperTarget planned for Woodbury now on hold. Target recently informed JMW that it would not [...]
Tweet Vineyard Bank of Rancho Cucamonga, California and Temecula Valley Bank of Temecula, California have become the 56th and 57th bank failures respectively in the US this year. California Bank & Trust of San Diego, California will assume the deposits of Vineyard Bank and First-Citizens Bank and Trust Company of Raleigh, North Carolina will assume [...]