Tag Archives: Real Estate Investment

Declining Real Estate Values

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Bloomberg published an article – Global Real Estate is Sitting on a $175 Billion Debt Time Bomb – Bloomberg – regarding the rise in distressed real estate debt and decline in values. 

The $175B in distressed real estate debt is quite striking – exceeding the combined total distressed debt of the next 9 largest distressed debt by asset types.

US real estate has declined 9% in value while UK real estate is down 20%. MSCI opines in its 2023 Trends to Watch in Real Assets – MSCI that London offices will need to decline by another 9% to be of interest to investors. But the US is lagging, not avoiding.

Of course. both distressed debt and declining values are intimately interconnected and amplified by the low cap rates and interest rates of the past.

For example, a property with $1 million net income valued at a 4.5 cap rate is $22.2 million and an 80% LTV loan would be $17.8 million. The same property at a 5.5 cap rate is valued at $18.2 million – an 18% decline in value. The loan LTV is now 98%. In short, the sponsor’s 5-10% equity and most, if not all, of the LP equity is wiped out.

Although the property could still be servicing the low interest rate debt, the minimum loan required LTV is out of balance – to which the regulators could turn a blind eye allowing the lenders to kick the can down the road – but the real distress will eventually come with the refinancing when the loan must be paid-down or deed handed over.

So, we’re entering the stage in the cycle of white knights and loan-to-own and bets on if we’re buying at a discount or catching the knife on the way down.

 

Nashville’s Star Rises as Midsize Cities Break Into Winners and Losers – The New York Times

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Forty years ago, Nashville and Birmingham, Ala., were peers. Two hundred miles apart, the cities anchored metropolitan areas of just under one million people each and had a similar number of jobs paying similar wages. Not anymore. The population of the Nashville area has roughly doubled, and young people have flocked there, drawn by high-paying jobs as much as its hip “Music City” reputation. Last month, the city won an important consolation prize in the competition for Amazon’s second headquarters: an operations center that will eventually employ 5,000 people at salaries averaging $150,000 a year.

Birmingham, by comparison, has steadily lost population, and while its suburbs have expanded, their growth has lagged the Nashville area’s. Once-narrow gaps in education and income have widened, and important employers like SouthTrust and Saks have moved their headquarters. Birmingham tried to lure Amazon, too, but all it is getting from the online retail giant is a warehouse and a distribution center where many jobs will pay about $15 an hour.

Amazon’s announcement has been widely described as a rich-get-richer victory of coastal “superstar cities” like New York and Washington, regions where the company plans to employ a total of at least 50,000 workers. But the company’s decisions also reflect another trend: growing inequality among midsize cities.

Nashville and the other Amazon also-rans, like Columbus, Ohio, and Indianapolis, are thriving because of a combination of luck, astute political choices and well-timed investments. At the same time, Birmingham and cities like it, including Providence, R.I., and Rochester, are falling further behind.

Source: Nashville’s Star Rises as Midsize Cities Break Into Winners and Losers – The New York Times

4 Projects That Show Mass Timber is the Future of American Cities

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As architects face up to the need for ethical, sustainable design in the age of climate change awareness, timber architecture is making a comeback in a new, technologically impressive way. Largely overlooked in the age of Modernism, recent years have seen a plethora of advancements related to mass timber across the world. This year alone, Japan announced plans for a supertall wooden skyscraper in Tokyo by 2041, while the European continent has seen plans for the world’s largest timber building in the Netherlands, and the world’s tallest timber tower in Norway.

4 Projects That Show Mass Timber is the Future of American Cities https://www.archdaily.com/905601/4-projects-that-show-mass-timber-is-the-future-of-american-cities

Figure of the week: Africa is home to the 10 fastest growing cities in the world

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The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs projects that the world’s 10 fastest growing cities, between 2018 and 2035, will all be in Africa. The visualization below first maps the location of the fastest growing cities in the world with a population greater than 2.5 million. Interestingly, many of the fastest growing African cities are specifically located on the Gulf of Guinea including Lagos, Abuja, Abidjan, Doula, and Kumasi.

Figure showing 30 of the world's fastest growing cities

 

 

 

 

Source: Figure of the week: Africa is home to the 10 fastest growing cities in the world

Rising seas could wipe out $1 trillion worth of U.S. homes and businesses | Grist

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Some 2.4 million American homes and businesses worth more than $1 trillion are at risk of “chronic inundation” by the end of the century, according to a report out Monday. That’s about 15 percent of all U.S. coastal real estate, or roughly as much built infrastructure as Houston and Los Angeles combined.

The sweeping new study from the Union of Concerned Scientists is the most comprehensive analysis of the risks posed by sea level rise to the United States coastal economy. Taken in context with the lack of action to match the scale of the problem, it describes a country plowing headlong into a flood-driven financial crisis of enormous scale.

 

Check out interactive map to see how your home, zip code or community does: http://US Coastal Property at Risk from Rising Seas.

Union of Concerned Scientists report at: Underwater: Rising Seas, Chronic Floods, and the Implications for US Coastal Real Estate (2018)

Grist: Rising seas could wipe out $1 trillion worth of U.S. homes and businesses

Artificial intelligence predicted to transform real estate investment by 2022 | News | Institutional Real Estate, Inc.

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Two-thirds (64.5 percent) of institutional investors believe that artificial intelligence (AI) will be widely adopted in the real estate sector by 2022, according to a new report by Intertrust, the leading global provider of high-value trust, corporate and fund services. Forty-two percent of those surveyed say the technology will be widely adopted by 2020.

“The use of AI in the industry has become an increasingly hot topic, with many predicting that it will fundamentally transform real estate investment real estate investment within two to three years,” said Jon Barratt, head of real estate at Intertrust.

BUT

Despite optimism about the future of AI, 33 percent of respondents said the technology isn’t yet ready for use in the real estate industry. The same proportion believe that this is caused by a lack of investment in AI from companies in the sector.

SO IT WILL IF IT DOES AND WON’T IF IT DOESN’T.

Source: Artificial intelligence predicted to transform real estate investment by 2022 | News | Institutional Real Estate, Inc.

Retrofitting suburbia: Old shopping malls can be saved by their parking lots – Business – CBC News

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In what some call “retrofitting suburbia,” fading food and department stores are reinventing their huge urban properties by filling them up with residential, office and retail space.And with Sears Canada closing dozens of department stores, new opportunities in these “mixed-use” developments now abound.”Just about every shopping centre — if they’re smart — is looking at this,” said Brent Toderian, an international consultant on urbanism and city planning based in Vancouver.Brent Toderian”Just about every shopping centre — if they’re smart — is looking at this,” said Brent Toderian, an international consultant on urbanism and city planning based in Vancouver. (CBC)”The recognition is that you can bring more customers, you can get more value out of the land and, particularly when you’re around transit, you can provide a lot more transit ridership rather than car dependency.”Such revelations aren’t new in the United States but the idea has caught fire more recently in Canada.

Source: Retrofitting suburbia: Old shopping malls can be saved by their parking lots – Business – CBC News

7 ZIPs That Exemplify Suburban Comeback | Realtor Magazine

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For the first time in a decade, the number of Americans living in suburbs grew faster than that of urban dwellers in 2017, buoyed by young homeowners who are planting roots outside cities, according to the Brookings Institute, a think tank based in Washington, D.C.“

You’re seeing more millennials moving to the suburbs, especially as they have kids,” says Danielle Hale, chief economist at realtor.com®. “People are definitely looking for affordability, better schools, less crime. … More outer suburbs have really put in an effort to develop walkable town centers and other places for people to gather to enjoy similar benefits they’d find in urban centers.”

Realtor.com®’s research team analyzed the ZIP codes outside the nation’s largest cities to find the best suburb for each major metro for families. They factored in housing affordability (defined as less than $400,000 to buy a home for most metros); percentage of children residing in each ZIP code; availability of child care; school rankings; number per capita of restaurants, bars, and museums; crime rates; and reasonable commuting time (considered 70 minutes or less).

Source: 7 ZIPs That Exemplify Suburban Comeback | Realtor Magazine

Bank of America confirms Dublin as location for EU hub

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Even if the UK reverses and doesn’t Brexit, the genie is out of the bottle. While London may survive as Europe’s premier financial center in a no-Brexit scenario, it will be by a smaller margin and with more competition.
Frankfurt and Dublin will be more important as financial centers with or without Brexit. Paris will gain – especially as high-speed transportation links advance. Just as Wall Street now stretches coast-to-coast, the European financial industry will spread across Europe. And don’t forget, non-financial institutions are also important and also relocating. For a country with strict gun control, the Tories-led UK has amazingly managed to shoot itself in one foot with no-Brexit and both feet with Brexit.

Wall Street giant Bank of America Merrill Lynch has picked Dublin as the preferred location of its EU hub, joining a growing number of international financial groups to outline initial plans for how they plan to deal with the fallout from Brexit.

Speaking to The Irish Times in Dublin on Friday, group chief executive Brian Moynihan said this will result in the bank’s existing Irish subsidiary merging with its current most important EU banking unit, based in London.

It will also involve the group setting up an EU trading operation, or broker-dealer, in the Republic, which will require separate Central Bank approval, he said.

 

Source: Bank of America confirms Dublin as location for EU hub

In Shadow of Manhattan, a Long-Neglected City Is Having a Moment

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Newark has been “coming back” since I went shopping there with my grandmother. This time it looks like it might actually succeed. Great transportation (PATH, AMTRAK, and NJ Transit train station), some great parks and neighborhoods, a great museum, corporate anchors, legal center, Rutgers University and an administration that wants to learn from Hoboken and Jersey City’s mistakes.

 

 

For years, downtown Newark’s Military Park, barren and surrounded by vacant buildings, was a symbol of the despair that set in after the 1967 riots. Now it’s at the center of hope that a long-sought recovery for New Jersey’s biggest city may finally be taking hold.

Source: In Shadow of Manhattan, a Long-Neglected City Is Having a Moment

NYC Real Estate | NYC Luxury Market | 432 Park Ave

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It took two months longer on average to sell a New York City luxury apartment in 2016 compared with 2015. That’s according to the real-estate agency Olshan Realty, which on Wednesday published its year-end report on the New York residential market.

It backed up other reports released earlier in 2016 that showed the luxury market in Manhattan, New York’s most expensive borough, had a tough year. Unlike other price segments of the housing market, there’s an excess of luxury apartments, giving buyers power to negotiate asking prices lower.

“New York City’s rental market has been mostly steady, except at the high end, where the inventory has risen and rents have drifted down,” the Federal Reserve said in a recent Beige Book based on comments from its contacts.

Source: NYC Real Estate | NYC Luxury Market | 432 Park Ave

Who’s Moving Into and Out of Washington, D.C. – Next City

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Construction workers, cashiers and janitors are moving out of Washington, D.C., while doctors, economists and software developers are moving in. As the cost of housing increases in the city, it’s part of a larger trend, says the District of Columbia’s Office of Revenue Analysis (ORA), which has low-wage workers fleeing for the suburbs, and higher-wage workers flocking to urban cores.

Source: Who’s Moving Into and Out of Washington, D.C. – Next City

Fear Spreads of a Housing Crash in Canada | Alternative Economics

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The reading marks a change from almost unbridled consumer optimism in a housing market that has carried the Canadian economy since the 2008 global financial crisis, even as policy makers warn price gains in some cities are unsustainable.

Source: Fear Spreads of a Housing Crash in Canada | Alternative Economics

The Global Real Estate Bubble Is OFFICIALLY Bursting | Seeking Alpha

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Bubbly cities like Singapore and Vancouver have started punishing foreign housing investors that have pushed up property prices to unaffordable – and unsustainable – rates. Foreign investors are now being taxed in many of these areas, and as a result, their real estate markets have begun to tank.During this housing burst, the most high-end, desirable locations will be hit the hardest.

Source: The Global Real Estate Bubble Is OFFICIALY Bursting | Seeking Alpha (sic)

The “New Housing Crisis” – Not Enough Rental Homes? | Zero Hedge

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The point here is that while the housing market has recovered – the media should be asking ‘Is that all the recovery there is?’

With 30-year mortgage rates below 4%, we should be in the middle of the next housing bubble with prices and home ownership rising. The question the media should be asking is “why?” Furthermore, what happens if the “bond market bears” get their wish and rates rise?

The housing recovery is ultimately a story of the “real” unemployment situation that still shows that roughly a quarter of the home buying cohort are unemployed and living at home with their parents. The remaining members of the home buying, household formation, contingent are employed but at lower ends of the pay scale and are choosing to rent due to budgetary considerations. This explains why household formation is near its lowest levels on record despite the “housing recovery” fairytale whispered softly in the media.

Housing-NetHouseholdFormation-072516

While the “official” unemployment rate suggests that the U.S. is near full employment, the roughly 94 million individuals sitting outside the labor force would likely disagree. Furthermore, considering that those individuals make up 45% of the 16-54 aged members of the workforce, it is no wonder that they are being pushed to rent due to budgetary considerations and an inability to qualify for a mortgage.

The risk to the housing recovery story remains in the Fed’s ability to continue to keep interest rates suppressed. It is important to remember that individuals “buy payments” rather than houses, so each tick higher in mortgage rates reduces someone’s ability to meet the monthly mortgage payment. With wages remaining suppressed, and a large number of individuals not working or on Federal subsidies, the pool of potential buyers remains contained.

The real crisis is NOT a lack of homes for people to buy, just a lack of enough homes for people to rent. Which says more about the “real economy” than just about anything else.

While there are many hopes pinned on the housing recovery as a “driver” of economic growth in 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 – the lack of recovery in the home ownership data suggests otherwise.

Source: The “New Housing Crisis” – Not Enough Rental Homes? | Zero Hedge

Manhattan Retail Market | Retail Vacancies NYC

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These days, hardly a week goes by without a new report about struggling retailers and rising vacancies in Manhattan.

Average retail asking rents fell year over year in seven of the borough’s 12 main retail submarkets in the first quarter of 2016, according to Cushman & Wakefield. And several prime shopping districts now have availability rates well over 20 percent, while stretches on Bleecker Street and Broadway have become notorious for their empty storefronts.

These signs of trouble are coinciding with record spending by retail investors and the rise of the retail condo.

Investors have shelled out $25 billion on Manhattan retail properties since the beginning of 2011, according to data from Real Capital Analytics. And in recent years, buyers have been more willing to dig deeper into their wallets and accept higher per-square-foot prices — forcing them to find tenants willing to pay high rents to justify their purchases.

Since 2000, RCA’s database counts 24 Manhattan retail condo sales that were priced at $10,000 per square foot or more. All of them closed after July 2011 and 17 closed in 2014 and 2015.

“I don’t want to say it’s a bubble but it’s been constantly bid up for six years,” Lee & Associates Managing Principal Peter Braus told The Real Deal.

Consolo added that retail condo sales prices have gone into the “stratosphere” in recent years.

“It is clear that there were numbers that were far too aggressive and the market just couldn’t keep up,” she said.

While real estate insiders are reluctant to call it a retail bubble, many acknowledge that a correction is imminent.

Michael Weiser, president of commercial brokerage GFI Realty Services, said the best indicator of whether Manhattan’s retail market is weakening is vacancy.

Availability rates — which measure the amount of retail space that is vacant or will become available — rose in all but one of Manhattan’s main retail submarkets between the first quarters of 2015 and 2016, according to Cushman.

Among those neighborhoods, several stand out: On Fifth Avenue between 42nd and 49th streets, a staggering 31 percent of retail space was available for lease. Meanwhile, Soho clocked in with a 25 percent availability rate followed by Herald Square and the Meatpacking District (both at 22 percent), Times Square (20 percent) and Madison Avenue (17 percent).

Braus said that owners who paid a steep price for retail space are more reluctant to accept lower rents. “That’s one reason why you’re seeing a lot of vacancies in those neighborhoods,” he noted.As it happens, those six districts were also home to the bulk of the priciest Manhattan retail purchases in the last two and half years, accounting for 57 of the 73 sales priced at $100 million or more recorded by RCA since January 2014. (That excludes office properties with retail components.) They are also among the neighborhoods where asking rents saw the steepest rise over the past two years, the numbers from Cushman & Wakefield show.

Worth the time to read the entire article here:

Source: Manhattan Retail Market | Retail Vacancies NYC | Thor

Jetson Green – Net Zero Prefab That Can be Built in Just Three Days

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Unity Homes has recently unveiled a prefab home, which is sustainable yet still made to last for at least as long as traditionally constructed homes. The home has a number of certifications, including LEED v4 Platinum, while it is also net-zero energy and can be constructed on site in three days or less. It is also fitted with the largest number of Cradle to Cradle (C2C) certified building products used in a residential project to…

Source: Jetson Green – Net Zero Prefab That Can be Built in Just Three Days

Why Commercial Real Estate Is Next: ‘Challenging Technicals’ Are About To Become ‘Weak Fundamentals’ | Zero Hedge

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There is a growing sense of tighter financial conditions, particularly to the commercial real estate sector. Late last year the regulators issued a joint statement on Prudent Risk Management for Commercial Real Estate Lending and the latest Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey (SLOOS) shows that banks tightened their lending standards to commercial real estate meaningfully in 4Q15…. The growing sense of gathering clouds in terms of tightening financial conditions to commercial real estate translates into a more challenging road ahead for US commercial real estate.

Source: Why Commercial Real Estate Is Next: ‘Challenging Technicals’ Are About To Become ‘Weak Fundamentals’ | Zero Hedge