Commercial Real Estate - NYC Edition (Long Creative Statistics)

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Oh great, positive news for the NYC commercial real estate market: "the number of direct available ground-floor spaces continued to decline..." in New York City "...for the second consecutive quarter, dropping 2.5 percent to 197 spaces from 202...." Sounds awesome, right? Yeah, maybe. Vacancies are down. But what's also down? Leasing activity. That's down. Square footage leased? Also down. What else? Asking rents. Down. Contract term length? Down. So, what's going on? Pop-ups, lots and lots of them. Allbirds, The Arrivals, and others are taking advantage of a renter's market in NYC commercial real estate and landlords are finally starting to get bent. Venture capitalists 1, New York City landlords 0. "In effect, what appears to be a retail market finding its new level is simply a short-term Band-Aid on what is still very much a declining environment." Leasing figures are "misleading" because of pop-ups and inventory "will reappear in the near term as short-termers expire." Hard to get fired up over this news. 

Vultures Are Swarming Around Houston Distressed Real Estate

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Vulture investors are swarming all around distressed Houston real estate. Because of course they are. Elsewhere, folks are beginning to worry about the effect of Amazon's ($AMZN) increased push into fashion: will it rock retail real estate even more than it has? With seven private labels now, Amazon is rumored to expand into sportswear, going directly after Nike ($NKE) and Under Armour ($UA). Query what level of data Amazon can leverage from usage of its AWS to crush its (new) competitors.

Distressed Real Estate on the Rise

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Should We Be Worried about New York City?

Combine lower tax collections, high commercial vacancies, decreased tourism and now this (spoiler alert: the most foreclosures in NYC since 2009) and we're beginning to think there's some reason to worry about New York City. You couldn't tell, though, from the mayoral race. Big Bird will probably come in second place via write-in vote. 

Distressed Real Estate = New "It" Thing

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Goldentree Asset Management and GTIS Partners have formed a joint venture called GTIS Capital Management to focus on real estate financing with loan sizes of $20-200mm (loan to own, anyone?). We reckon that this is a leading indicator that distressed real estate will be an active place to play in coming years. They may have to compete with this phenomenon.