Surprise Surprise: More Store Closings

More store closings are expected. This doesn’t come as much of a surprise. Given the percentage of sales retailers ring up during the holiday season, it was obvious it would have been wise to get through the holiday season and then put the wheels of closure back in action.
Bloomberg has a pretty cool little multimedia [...]

Laub: Commercial Real Estate Prices Close to “Bottom”

Kenneth Laub, CEO of Kenneth D Laub & Co., a New York real estate advisor was on Bloomberg. He provided a pretty clear analysis of what’s going on, and that is prices are tied directly to a stabilization in unemployment. He also did a good job of indicating that some of the most troubled assets [...]

A “Bloodbath” In Silicon Valley

Bloomberg is out with a hit piece on Silicon Valley’s office space market.
More than 43 million square feet (4 million square meters) — the equivalent of 15 Empire State Buildings — stood vacant at the end of the third quarter, the most in almost five years, according to CB Richard Ellis Group Inc. San Jose, [...]

AMB Property’s Hamid Moghadam on Bloomberg

Hamid Moghadam, CEO of AMB Property Corporation on Bloomberg. AMB’s portfolio includes som 150M plus square feet of industrial real estate worldwide.
…he thinks we’ve hit a trough and reasonably optimistic over next 6-9 months….

Luxury Hotels at Risk – Bloomberg Video

We’ve already seen numerous defaults in luxury hotels in San Francisco, some strategic defaults, others out of pure distress. Nonetheless, the pressure is mounting. We’ve been at a point now where RevPAR has been under immense pressure for quite some time, coupled with significant speculative acquisitions which took place over the past few years by [...]

Treasury Reworking Tax Rules to Help Dampen Commercial Real Estate Fallout

The Treasury today introduced new tax rules to help services, borrowers, and lenders to modify loans without having to worry about triggering tax penalties.
Until now, tax rules have made it difficult for borrowers who are current on their payments to hold restructuring talks with the servicers of these bonds. Developers and investors complain that only [...]

Bloomberg Interviews NY CBRE Broker

Bloomberg interviewed a top CBRE broker out of NYC today, and the interview is below. Nothing most of the readers here haven’t known, but just some reinforcement from a source just perhaps a bit more credible than some “faceless blog”
Also, is it just me or does the show’s host look like Avigdor Lieberman?

U.S. Office and Retail Vacancy Continues Its Ascent

REIS is out with its latest US office vacancy numbers, and not surprisingly, they don’t look good. It’s expected that this year will end with office vacancy rates at nearly 17%, and rents down 7.4%. They are also projecting 2010 vacancy at 17.6 percent, about 1% below the high that was reached in 1992. That is [...]

Banks Bracing For CRE Defaults

An article in Bloomberg this morning provides some additional detail on bank exposure to commercial real estate. Most of the banks seem ready to take on the losses, but they don’t seem too worried, which is quite reminiscent of the early days of the crisis in the residential sector. According to the article:

The country’s 10 [...]

CMBS Ratings Being Reviewed – It’s a Slippery Slope

Bloomberg is reporting that Moody’s is reviewing its ratings of roughly $300B worth of CMBS debt amidst a drop in values. According to the article,

The review encompasses 52 percent of outstanding U.S. commercial mortgage-backed debt ranked by Moody’s
The ratings of so-called senior and mezzanine AAA bonds, the top two classes of CMBS accounting for about [...]