Free Republic

Now that we have had the second Trump Assassination attempt that our researchers predicted, a simple comparison will help us keep straight what we know in both cases. First, Thomas Crooks wasn’t even born before Ryan Routh committed his first felony on April 23rd, 2002 for possession of Weapons Of Mass Destruction in Guilford County, North Carolina. Fast forward to last year, Routh managed a group called the International Volunteer Legion that organized mercenaries to fight in Ukraine and was in Ukraine for five months and made lobbying trips to Washington, DC for that purpose. Routh conducted several fundraisers to...

All eyes are on the office sector as the future of commercial buildings in many cities depends upon its success, but the future isn’t looking too bright. Foreclosure rates on commercial properties have increased 48% from last year, according to a recent report from ATTOM. This rise in foreclosures is part of a larger overall trend. After reaching a peak in October 2014 with 889 commercial foreclosures, the numbers fell to a record low of 141 in May 2020 and then began rising again. Declining office performance likely attributed to the year-over-year increase in commercial foreclosures, said Joe Brady, former...

Building Just Sold at a 97.5% Discount The sale price of 135 West 50th Street in Midtown, which is only 35 percent full, was a sign of how much the pandemic upended the market for office buildings in New York City. COMMENT #1: Mr. Armstrong, I had to write to say thank you so much for everything you do. When Trump was indicted, you said sell and get out of New York. Your advice has always been discussed with our board, and the decision was made to sell in light of your ECM also turning in 2024. We managed to...

From furniture installers to plant whisperers, businesses are reeling from record-high office vacancy rates.Bay Area carpet and flooring company Conklin Bros. has existed in one form or another for nearly a century and a half, starting with a mule-drawn wagon and weathering the 1906 earthquake and a constant cycle of economic booms and busts. An employee for the past 35 years, JoAnn Edson, can’t remember business ever being as slow as it is now. “We’re struggling,” she said. “We’re just trying to stay open and stay afloat.” Before Covid, Conklin Bros. bustled with flooring orders for local offices, hotels and...

The national office vacancy rate hit a record 19.8% in the first quarter of 2024, according to a preliminary report from Moody’s Analytics. And it could get worse, as companies continue to lease substantial space despite a decline in the in-office footprint. The 'urban doom loop' cycleWhile the shift to remote work in recent years offers plenty of flexibility to employees, some experts have concerns the decline in office building usage could spell a more sinister problem for big cities. “Everybody’s affected by this issue,” Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, a professor of real estate at Columbia Business School, told CNN. Van...

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — A judge recently placed a Louisville skyscraper in a receivership after its owners defaulted on a $28 million loan, according to new court documents. A lawsuit was filed in June by lender Wilmington Trust National Association in Jefferson County Circuit Court, and accused the owners of the Meidinger Tower of failing to make a monthly payment of $142,204.82 last November. The plaintiffs also claim the owners have not made a payment in any subsequent month.

Homework clubThe pandemic turned the world upside down. People stockpiled toilet paper, did yoga over Zoom, baked banana bread, bought Pelotons, went crazy for online shopping, and anyone who was even thinking about buying a pool went and got one. Pretty much all of those trends have since returned to normal, but a major one has remained: working from home.According to new data published in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Time Use Survey for 2023, ~35% of all employed persons in the US spent the average working day doing at least some of their work from home — up from...

Did NAIOP get the memo? NAIOP (National Association of Industrial and Office Properties) is a trade group comprised of commericial real estate developers and academics. Lobbying for more office space to be built despite overbuilding, Another chink in the armor of the US economy (not the roaring economy Biden and Yellen keep screaming about). Overbuilding of office space, COVID shutdowns, remote working and urban crime. A recipe for office vacancy. Moody's predicts 24% of office towers will be vacant by 2026! During the first three months of 2023, U.S. office vacancy topped 20 percent for the first time in decades....

The 19.6% of office space that isn’t leased is the highest since at least 1979 ... America’s offices are emptier than at any point in at least four decades, reflecting years of overbuilding and shifting work habits that were accelerated by the pandemic. A staggering 19.6% of office space in major U.S. cities wasn’t leased as of the fourth quarter, according to Moody’s Analytics, up from 18.8% a year earlier. That is slightly above the previous records of 19.3% set in 1986 and 1991 and the highest number since at least 1979, which is as far back as Moody’s data...

Imagine San Francisco 18 years from now. That’s more than four mayoral terms, at least one fashion cycle and nearly one Van Ness rapid bus lane project away. Generation Alpha—who will be adults—will likely be calling Gen Z “out of touch” by then. And—according to new long-term projections from real estate firm Avison Young—San Francisco won’t be left with a glut of empty office buildings anymore. On that front, the situation midway through 2024 is pretty grim. The city has the highest vacancy rate of any major market in the country—at more than 30%. Using previous recovery periods as a...

A new report is revealing how illegal drug funds have made their way through the commercial real estate market in South Florida “and beyond”, according to Bisnow. Among examples was Miami’s Sefira Capital, who agreed to forfeit over $29M in 2021 to settle a DEA investigation into money laundering, though it admitted no wrongdoing. The firm was accused of ignoring red flags about investor funds and was implicated in a DEA sting operation, revealing millions in drug money flowed through its investment fund, Bisnow reports. The probe included a $63M hotel acquisition near Washington, D.C., and an office building in...

The tallest building in Fort Worth has a commanding position in the city’s skyline, but the 1M SF building only commanded a price of about $12 per square foot at a foreclosure auction. The price per square foot amounted to less than 10% of the previous sale price for Burnett Plaza, which at 40 stories towers over the other buildings in Fort Worth. The winning bidder was one of Burnett Plaza’s lenders: Pinnacle Bank Texas bought back the building at this month’s auction with a bid of $12.3M, according to a report in the Dallas Business Journal. The previous owner,...

Lightning strikes TWICE! One year after regional banks crashed and burned due to the combination of tumbling debt/treasury prices coupled with cratering commercial real estate loans, fears about the current state of Commercial Real Estate – where most offices still see tenants at best 3 to 4 days a week and are literally burning through rents – appear long forgotten. Is that sensible? For one answer, we turned to the latest report from Goldman’s REIT/CRE expert Chandhi Luthra who has published a visual assessment of the state of CRE in 2024 in terms of loan maturities, 2023 extensions, and property...

The Biden administration is being ridiculed for hypocrisy as it touts 'energy savings' at federal buildings that are nearly empty of workers - and wasting billions of taxpayer dollars. Energy Sec. Jennifer Granholm recently celebrated the Biden administration's efforts to reach net-zero emissions from federal buildings by establishing a rule outlawing the use of fossil fuels on-site. 'The Biden-Harris Administration is practicing what we preach,' Granholm said in a statement about the rule. 'Just as we are helping households and businesses across the nation save money by saving energy, we are doing the same in our own federal buildings.' But...

The Biden administration is being ridiculed for hypocrisy as it touts 'energy savings' at federal buildings that are nearly empty of workers - and wasting billions of taxpayer dollars. Energy Sec. Jennifer Granholm recently celebrated the Biden administration's efforts to reach net-zero emissions from federal buildings by establishing a rule outlawing the use of fossil fuels on-site. 'The Biden-Harris Administration is practicing what we preach,' Granholm said in a statement about the rule. 'Just as we are helping households and businesses across the nation save money by saving energy, we are doing the same in our own federal buildings.' But...

S&P Global Ratings announced yesterday that it was changing its outlook on San Francisco's debt from stable to negative.The outlook on the city-county’s outstanding general obligation and appropriation debt was cut to negative from stable this week by the ratings company. The weakness in the city’s commercial real estate market and tourism activity were factors that drove the move, S&P said. Adding to the city’s burdens, San Francisco’s budget expenditures outpaced revenue growth in fiscal 2023.To be clear, the ratings agency hasn't downgraded the city's credit rating, which is still at "AAA," the highest possible. A downgrade in the credit...

Bidenomics is also a Highway To Hell for commercial real estate. Let’s say real estate is thunderstruck under Bidenomics. There are more dormant office towers in the United States than at any point since 1979, according to a new report from Moody’s Analytics, which began tracking office leasing vacancies that year. The rising supply of office space is due to a combination of surging remote and hybrid work that forces companies to reduce corporate footprints. Also, companies are exiting imploding progressive cities and high-taxed blue states for red ones while downsizing space. In the report, office tower vacancies rose to...

A Department of Transportation component slammed the brakes following semi-furious opposition to its proposal for "on demand" law enforcement surveillance of commercial vehicles a year and a half ago. It took another six months to turn over the records after a FOIA lawsuit to compel their release, a day before they were due in court Thursday, with no indication yet from FMCSA when it would release a final rule. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration had internal conversations about those public comments over several months, including via personal email, at the same time it was stalling a Freedom of Information...

The Meltdown of Commercial Real EstateIn case you’ve still got money in a bank, Bloomberg is warning that defaults in commercial real estate loans could “topple” hundreds of US banks.Leaving taxpayers on the hook for trillions in losses.The note, by Senior Editor James Crombie, walks us through the festering hellscape that is commercial real estate.To set the mood, a new study predicts that nearly half of downtown Pittsburgh office space could be vacant in 4 years. Major cities like San Francisco are already sporting zombie-apocalypse downtowns, with abandoned office buildings baking in the sun.So what happened? The Fed’s yo-yo interest...

Across the country, deals are starting to pick up, revealing just how far real estate prices have fallen. That’s spurring widespread concern about losses that can ripple across the global financial system — as underscored by the recent turmoil unleashed by New York Community Bancorp, Japan’s Aozora Bank and Germany’s Deutsche Pfandbriefbank as they took steps to brace for bad loans. In Manhattan, brokers have started to market debt backed by a Blackstone-owned office building at a roughly 50% discount. A prime office tower in Los Angeles sold in December for about 45% less than its purchase price a decade...