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The typical American shopping mall landscape has changed drastically—and for the worse—in recent years, in large part because nearly every item sold from a traditional brick-and-mortar store can be purchased online. Consumers who would rather devote time to things other than driving to a mall have benefitted. The retail behemoth Amazon.com even promises to deliver packages in two days. That has left lower end centers and malls in trouble.
Finally, after years of fluctuation that only sometimes favored the commercial real estate market, experts have predicted that slow and steady progress will rule the day—at least for 2018. Accounting firm giant PricewaterhouseCooper (PwC) and the Urban Land Institute (ULI) have put out their annual report: Emerging Trends in Real Estate®2018. The report predicts slower but more sustainable growth for the U.S. real estate market, based on 2 percent annual gross domestic product (GDP) growth and 1 percent job growth.
As online shopping has become ubiquitous over the past several years, with e-commerce giants like Amazon offering seemingly every product under the sun and with free delivery for subscribers, retail tenants that have set up shop in centers and malls have suffered from sales slumps, more or less severe depending on geographical region and local economies. But especially at malls, major buildings still stand even after a retail giant goes out of business or isn’t viable in a location and moves.
In a notice of proposed rulemaking the Federal Reserve Board said it wants to raise the threshold for commercial real estate transactions requiring an appraisal to $400,000. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency noted that raising this threshold for commercial real estate transactions from the current level of $250,000 could significantly reduce the number of transactions that require an appraisal, while not posing a problem for banks.
Commercial real estate brokerage giant Cushman & Wakefield’s global chief economist, Kevin Thorpe, has warned that an oversupply of office space is likely and that such a glut could become scary for a market that has only recently begun to recover from the economic downturn of nearly a decade ago. As the world’s economies rebound, developers have embarked on a construction spree that will create a large amount of office space—700 million square feet is currently under construction worldwide—and experts are concerned about an oversupply.
A new three-year economic forecast from the Urban Land Institute (ULI) Center for Capital Markets and Real Estate predicts that the U.S. economy and commercial real estate industry are, in general, expected to experience moderate growth through much of 2019. The ULI Real Estate Consensus Forecast, a semi-annual outlook, is based on a survey of 53 of the industry’s top economists and analysts representing 39 of the country’s leading real estate investment, advisory, and research firms and organizations.
The Urban Land Institute’s most recent commercial real estate survey has revealed the CRE market’s anticipated trajectory. CRE has benefitted from six consecutive years of growth, but the experts polled by ULI predict that it will taper off by 2017. The slower growth in property prices and rental rates won’t be dangerous, though, as survey respondents said that “better-than-average” operating fundamentals in most property types would still be seen.
Pennsylvania commercial real estate owners and tenants are both about to the feel the impact of the Keystone state’s recent decision to legalize medical marijuana. That’s because dispensaries will be looking for space in shopping centers, which could be lucrative for owners whose properties have all the right characteristics for that type of business; it could be a terrifying proposition for a tenant whose business nature is at odds with marijuana sales, even though it’s legal.
A new bill that would require online retailers to collect and remit state sales taxes has been introduced by U.S. Reps. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, and Steve Womack, R-Ark. The Remote Transactions Parity Act (H.R. 2775) follows Womack’s Marketplace Fairness Act, which passed in the Senate last year but stalled in the House.
The International Property Measurement Standard for Offices (IPMS for Office Buildings) took effect last month, creating a uniform method for measuring property globally. By replacing dozens of standards around the world, the new standard is expected to eliminate confusion, inconsistencies, and conflicting property size quotes that could vary by as much as 24 percent for the same space, according to research by property firm Jones Lang LaSalle.
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