Building a property from the ground up entails substantially more risk than purchasing an existing building that is already generating income. Likewise, financing construction is riskier than lending against existing structures since development projects don’t generate income to pay loan interest until they are completed. For this reason, most ...

In times of economic uncertainty, people tend to stay put. After all, why take on new financial obligations, like an apartment lease, when the future is less certain? Today, though unemployment remains low, inflation remains high, and the recent slew of layoffs at tech companies has many worried about their own financial position. The recent, ...

When most people think of a loan, they think of a bank. Banks take deposits from customers in return for interest payments or other services. The bank then invests those deposits in loans, such as commercial real estate (CRE) loans, and securities that pay a higher interest rate than the bank is paying on the deposits. However, a bank is not the ...

After the recent bank failures, a good deal of attention has been paid to commercial real estate (CRE) debt held by banks of different sizes. But banks aren’t the only CRE lenders. Insurance companies, mortgage REITs, and private debt funds that lend investors’ money also regularly make CRE loans. Taken together, banks of all sizes only account ...

At first glance, converting old office buildings into apartments seems like an obvious solution to two pressing real estate challenges. There’s a national housing shortage of several millions of housing units, and office space is substantially underutilized due to the adoption of remote work. Declining office use is a significant risk to office ...

Retail real estate remains a challenged asset class, although locations catering to experiential services so far appear to be more resilient than others. Even before the onset of the pandemic, the rise of eCommerce and the shift away from mall culture created an uncertain outlook for many types of retail locations. In this month’s X-Factor, let’s ...

The performance of retail real estate is closely tied to consumer spending trends. Over the last year, consumers have benefitted from meaningful wage growth, but inflation has erased most of those gains. Similarly, despite nominal retail sales growing by approximately 5.4 percent in February, retail spending in real terms has fallen over the last ...

Industrial space remains in high demand across the country, despite announcements of tabled expansion plans from eCommerce companies and retail store closures. That strong demand has fueled record levels of construction that will ease price and rent growth to more moderate, single-digit rates as the new industrial supply comes to market. The ...

Demand to lease and own industrial space remains robust, despite a general cooling of commercial real estate (CRE) activity occurring across asset classes. Net absorption, a measure of leasing demand relative to available space, remained high in the fourth quarter of last year compared with historical levels, at 112 million square feet. Though ...

Several indicators now point firmly to a broad cooling in commercial real estate (CRE) markets. The extent of the cooling, however, varies meaningfully by asset class and geography.