CRE X-Factor - When Will Commercial Property Prices Recover?
By
Xander Snyder on July 10, 2023
The data is clear – commercial real estate (CRE) property prices are undergoing an adjustment. With that in mind, many industry professionals and investors are asking the next logical questions – how far will prices fall and when will prices bottom out and recover. Examining historical CRE data offers some clues, but, as the old adage goes, ...
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You Can’t Build What You Can’t Fund
By
Xander Snyder on June 19, 2023
Securing commercial real estate (CRE) financing in today’s market is no easy task. After the three bank failures this year, which triggered increased regulatory scrutiny of bank-held CRE loans, banks have pulled back on lending. This is especially true for riskier varieties of lending, such as construction loans, which involve assets that are not ...
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Bank Pull Back Creates Construction Lending Opportunity for Debt Investors
By
Xander Snyder on June 12, 2023
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 ...
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Uncertain Economic Outlook Keeps Renters Where They Are, Pushing Cap Rates Up
By
Xander Snyder on May 23, 2023
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, ...
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CRE X-Factor: For Commercial Real Estate, Banks Aren’t the Only Lender in Town
By
Xander Snyder on May 9, 2023
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 ...
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Where is the Risk Exposure to Commercial Real Estate?
By
Xander Snyder on May 5, 2023
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 ...
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Why it’s So Hard to Convert Offices into Housing
By
Xander Snyder on April 13, 2023
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 ...
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CRE X-Factor: Retail’s Tailwinds Turn to Headwinds
By
Xander Snyder on April 10, 2023
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 ...
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What Does Consumer Spending Signal about the Health of Retail Real Estate?
By
Xander Snyder on April 4, 2023
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 ...
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CRE X-Factor: Outlook for Industrial Real Estate Remains Positive, Despite Dip from Record-Setting 2021
By
Xander Snyder on March 13, 2023
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 ...
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