What I'm Reading Down for the Count: Leisure travel has experienced a strong bounce back year in 2021. However, business travel is still struggling. Corporate, group, government, and other commercial travel – are expected to be down by $59 billion in 2021 from 2019, according to a report from the...
June 7th – Not As It Seems
One Big Thing As you can see from the Chart of the Day Below, we are finally back to 1970 levels when it comes to housing production in the United States (h/t Taylor Grant). Hooray, I guess. While things are certainly better than they were a few years ago, this...
March 12th – Big Shift
What I'm Reading Turning Inward: Foreign investors in the US are changing their sights from trophy properties in a handful of gateway cities to secondary markets that are experiencing population and job growth as persistently low yields make it hard to meet return targets. Yardi Matrix Same as it Ever...
May 11th – Running of the Bulls
What I'm Reading Glass Half Full: The results DLA Piper’s latest State of the Market Survey revealed no shortage of bullish sentiment about commercial real estate with 74% expressing optimism about the market in 2021 versus just 24% a year prior. Respondents were especially bullish on markets like Austin and...
May 10th – Leading Indicator
What I'm Reading Out Ahead: Zumper's National Rent Report last week showed some improvements in most, but not all of the expensive coastal cities that were hit especially hard by COVID. IMO, the big news was in some of the raw search data that wasn't in the report but rather...
April 16th – Backlog
What I'm Reading Backlog: During COVID, many US courts stopped functioning for months before adopting new technologies to move cases through, albeit more slowly than before. At the same time, cases including landlord-tenant disputes, foreclosures, contract disputes, tax appeals, partnership settlements have been piling up. Experts fear that once courts...
March 25th – Compression
What I'm Reading Compression: With Class A cap rates at incredibly low levels, industrial real estate investors are increasingly targeting well-located B and C product to generate higher returns. According to a new report by Cushman and Wakefield, average cap rates for Class A properties declined by 33 basis points...
January 12th – Fallout
What I’m Reading Fallout: CoStar is estimating that the reckoning from COVID will eventually result in $126 billion of distressed real estate sales with a heavy concentration in lodging and retail. However, with an estimated $200 billion of capital raised to capitalize on such an opportunity, it is difficult to see...
December 14th – Unlocked
What I’m Reading Unlocked: Increased adoption of remote work has enabled high earners to move to lower tax states like never before. At some point high tax cities and states are going to have to acknowledge that the conditions that allowed them to increase rates – namely the requirement of proximity...
December 9th – Balancing Act
One Big Thing California’s eviction moratorium is scheduled to expire in early February. A new assembly bill is seeking to extend it through the end of 2021. Concurrently another assembly bill is attempting to establish a framework for dispersing rental relief. (h/t Steve Sims) Connect Media Two comments here: While I’m...