What I'm Reading Turning Point: Amazon has dominated the industrial leasing market, sending prices soaring. However, the ecommerce giant is now beginning to pivot away from leasing towards buying and developing its own facilities. Bisnow Will be interesting to watch how this plays out as a competitor with zero capital...
October 20th – Max Capacity
What I'm Reading Max Capacity: Prologis, the world's largest logistics warehouse operator has announced that their facilities are effectively full. Freight Waves This begs the question: even if (HUGE IF) running port operations 24/7 increases capacity, where do all of those goods actually go once they leave the ports complexes...
October 19th – Bluebird
What I'm Reading Bluebird Conditions: With low interest rates, strong capital flows and a favorable market outlook, conditions are more ripe for a lending boom than they have been in years. Question is whether or not the lending discipline that has defined the market since the end of the Great...
October 14th – Long Shot
What I'm Reading Long Shot: Zelman and Associates released a contrarian residential market call, claiming that today's tight housing market is already getting overbuilt thanks to the downward trajectory of population growth per the 2020 Census. CNBC Other analysts, like Jay Parsons of RealPage were quick to jump on this...
October 12th – Held Back
What I'm Reading Trailing Indicator: Soaring home prices mean that more appraisals are coming in below contractual sales prices, causing deals to collapse. The fact that it often takes a couple of months to close these transactions means that comps, which appraisers rely heavily upon, tend to lag. While painful...
October 7th – Shop Shop
What I'm Reading Chop Shop: The latest investment trend is buying tiny pieces of everything from real estate and cars, to art, fine wine and memorabilia. Vox Looking Inward: Foreign investors are following in the footsteps of their domestic counterparts, focusing on secondary markets with strong fundamentals over their traditional...
October 6th – Thin Air
What I'm Reading Thin Air: Mortgage payments are getting more unaffordable as record home price growth erases savings delivered by historically low interest rates. Wall Street Journal The affordability problem will continue to get worse if / when interest rates continue to rise. Borrowers have record equity in their homes...
October 4th – No Takers
What I'm Reading No Takers: Spurred on by the Biden Administration, the Port of Long Beach began offering a pilot program offering 24-hour container operations over two weeks ago. To date, not a single trucker has taken advantage of it. The reason? Burdensome requirements (of course). Wall Street Journal On...
September 30th – Overreaction
What I'm Reading Overreaction: The feared tsunami of evictions predicted when the Supreme Court struck down a federal ban on evictions in August has failed to materialize. In fact, the number of filings have dropped or remained flat since the decision. Washington Post It’s almost as if they relied on...
September 28th – Hoarding?
What I'm Reading Hoarding: Panicked American shippers may be overbuying goods in an attempt to build inventory to provide a cushion in the event of another global crisis. They are making the current container crisis worse. Splash Its Bad Everywhere: There are over 60 container ships full of import cargo...