Commercial Real Estate News

May 11, 2018

How Cloud-Based Software Is Transforming The Commercial Real Estate Industry

According to the McKinsey Global Institute, the world creates roughly 2.2 exabytes — that’s 2.2 billion gigabytes — of data every day. While this proliferation of data is spread across millions if not billions of individual devices, simply storing this much information is becoming increasingly difficult, to say nothing of organizing it.

This challenge is particularly pronounced in industries like commercial real estate (CRE), where data is the driving force behind every transaction. As industry sage and blogger Duke Long points out, “It’s one thing to acquire terabytes of data, [but] it’s quite another to cleanse and mobilize that data in service of real-time insights into the commercial real estate market.”

U.S. Banks Loosened Commercial Real Estate Lending Standards For First Time In 3 Years: Fed

commercial real estate lending standards are loosening

The numbers: Banks eased standards on commercial real estate loans for the first time in almost three years, according to the Fed’s quarterly survey of senior loan officers, released on Tuesday.

Over the past year, banks eased important lending terms — including maximum loan size and the spread of loan rates over their cost of funds — on all three commercial real estate loan categories: construction and land development loans, nonfarm nonresidential loans and multifamily loans. Demand for all types of business lending reportedly weakened.

For consumers, mortgage loan standards were basically unchanged while standards for auto and credit card loans tightened modestly. There was weak demand for most categories of household loans.

The Fed surveyed officers at 72 domestic banks.

Rapid Startup Growth In These 4 Cities Has Led To Big Changes In Commercial Real Estate

According to PwC’s “2018 Emerging Trends in Real Estate — U.S. and Canada,” Seattle is set to become the strongest real estate market in the country this year.

Driven by a massive influx of young, highly educated new residents — the city’s population growth rate is twice the national average, and the metro area is expected to gain nearly 30,000 new residents annually through at least 2022 — Seattle appears ready to stake its claim alongside cities like San Francisco and New York City as a true blue-chip real estate market.

Read more here.

How The Experience Economy Is Affecting Commercial Real Estate

experience economy is affecting commercial real estate

The commercial real estate market is extremely competitive and enticing major brands to select one development over another requires more than just “location, location, location.”

With everything getting “smarter,” from devices to cities, the expectation for brands is that real estate property will keep pace with evolving technical standards. Up until now, branding considerations in property design have taken a backseat in terms of developers’ top priorities, but they will become increasingly important as the experience economy continues to mature.

Read more here.

How The U.S. Worker Shortage Is Putting A Crimp In Real Estate

At a 3.9% unemployment rate, the U.S. economy is at full employment, or pretty close — economists disagree on that fine point. But the fact remains that as of January, about 6.3 million positions are open but unfilled, a record high.

Yet companies across industries are having trouble finding employees, which is hobbling growth. According to the Manpower Group, roughly 40% of employers globally report difficulty filling jobs due to insufficient talent. It isn’t just tech or IT jobs — the jobs gap is impacting the skilled trades most of all.

Read more here.

E-Commerce Costs Rise Just As Commercial Real Estate Costs Fall

(Bloomberg) — As Amazon remains seemingly unstoppable and the struggles of physical retailers like Toys “R” Us continue to make headlines, two trends in retail seem irrefutable: E-commerce will only get bigger, and physical retail needs to figure out how to reinvent itself.

But some of the economic pressures facing both industries are changing the value equation.

For the first time since the dawn of e-commerce, physical retail might find itself with some cost advantages over e-commerce firms — especially those not named Amazon.

Read more here.

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