[quote author="acpme" date=1253928079][quote author="Joe33" date=1253920804]I work in large multi-family investment area and I would say that prices have started to tick back up in the last 60 days. I don't know if that is applicable at all to industrial condos, but it is definitely happening.
When people say that commercial RE is about to blow up and has years to go they are completely wrong....or at least looking at it sideways. Commercial RE has already completely blown up. Prices are down 30% to 40%. Rents and revenue are way down. Vacancy is way up. All that has already happened. What hasn't happened yet is for all of the upside down loan problems that the value declines created to be recognized by those that are going to suffer the losses. The lenders are already way upside down on billions of commercial RE loans, they just haven't recognized and accounted for the problem yet. So I guess it depends on your perspective if you think that the commercial RE decline has years to go because like I said earlier, prices have started to tick upwards a little bit in multifamily. Of course it doesn't hurt that in multi-family you can get great loans from fannie and freddie that no other commercial RE sector gets.</blockquote>
if we believe the consensus view of flat employment growth regardless of "recovery" in a macro sense, wouldn't that mean industrial fundamentals continue to decline, or at least will remain stagnant? aside from cost of debt, multi-family is different in that leases are short-term and any improvement in the economy means higher revenue right away. sectors with longer-term leases are probably still rolling over higher rents signed at/before the peak. any tenant signing new long-term leases in the past yr and through next yr are probably going to be underpaying the market 3+ yrs from now, but what can a landlord do? in other words, slow macro recovery tends to be even slower for CRE.</blockquote>
That is absolutely right. Multi-family has already experienced a good amount of its revenue decline while the longer term lease product types (office, industrial, retail) will probably be experiencing it for at least the next couple of years. But at least from a value perspective, all of that decline is already baked into the cake. Anybody running a pro-forma to buy a commercial building is assuming all of those things to happen, and their overall underwriting is pretty conservative due to the state of the economy. The thing that would cause values to drop further would be an economy that trends lower than what those expecations already are. That is certainly possible. But for now, with a stabilizing economy, I think those values are stabilizing as well.