What I'm Reading Ghost Town: Manhattan’s office availability rate hit 17.4% last month, a new record, according to Colliers data. Since the pandemic began in March 2020, overall availability has increased by 74.1% and now sits at nearly 94M SF. Bisnow Stepping Up: Amazon is pulling back on its logistics...
October 29th – Clutter Patrol
What I'm Reading Misplaced Blame: The Biden administration has pushed the Ports of LA and Long Beach to begin fining carriers who don't move their containers from the port complexes quickly enough. By this logic, the problems are apparently not a massive backlog and capacity constraints but rather that the...
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 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...
August 4th – Help Wanted
What I'm Reading Help Wanted: Booming demand for warehouse space, bolstered by the record 423.7 million square feet of industrial property under completion this quarter, could lead to significant labor shortages in the near term. A new report from Newmark estimates that more than 280,000 additional warehouse workers will be...
June 29th – Fuel on the Fire
What I'm Reading Fuel on the Fire: Every $1 billion in additional e-commerce sales requires 1 million square feet of new warehouse space to support it. Using this calculation as a baseline, the US will need 330 million square feet of new space by 2025 just to keep up with...
June 16th – Called It
What I'm Reading Called It: About a year ago, there was a lot of handwringing over what would happen to the millions of homeowners in forbearance once accommodations expired. I pointed out (on the old blog) that we wouldn't see any meaningful distressed sales because borrowers were equity rich. Instead,...
June 8th – Slow Out of the Gate
What I'm Reading Slow Out of the Gate: Another meh jobs report shows that the summertime economic boom that many anticipated with reopening may not be quite so hot: "To the degree that the labor shortage is caused by expanded jobless benefits or schools that are closed, it should go...
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...
January 13th – Digging Deeper
What I’m Reading Digging Deeper: Last week’s jobs report was ugly on the surface. However, if you look deeper past the temporary losses, it was actually fairly strong given the circumstances and reveals the underlying resilience of the economy. Tim Duy’s Fed Watch Inflection Point: With a vaccination-fueled economic turnaround expected to begin...