By Bob Bach, National Director of Market Analytics, Newmark Grubb & Knight Frank:

The long-awaited increase in secondary market transactions is starting to happen.

By Bob Bach, Senior Vice President & Chief Economist, Grubb & Ellis Co.
Despite the turmoil in Europe and the economic deceleration in the United States, commercial real estate is holding up well compared to other asset classes.

By Bob Bach, Grubb & Ellis Co.

Yet another gap is opening between Main Street and Washington, this one involving inflation expectations. Federal Reserve officials have repeated again and again that they don’t think inflation will take hold anytime soon because there is so much excess capacity weighing down the economy in the form of unemployed workers, too many houses, low rates of factory utilization and vacant commercial space. Most mainstream economists agree with that assessment. Yet when I speak with individual investors, I always ask for a show of hands on whether they think inflation will become problematic in the next year or two, and nearly everyone in the room raises a hand.

By Bob Bach, Grubb & Ellis Inc.

One of my colleagues at Grubb & Ellis recently wrote the following: “From a longer-term perspective, look for investment capital to flow to those states that optimize the blend of balanced budgets, low taxes (property, income and sales), low regulation and business incentives. Businesses and people are more mobile than ever, and intelligent capital will go there first.” This is an intriguing concept, but is it true?

By Bob Bach, Grubb & Ellis:

Counter-forces that have turned the tide in favor of apartments. Mortgages are harder to get because banks are studying the creditworthiness of borrowers more carefully than they did during the boom. Moreover, fewer households want to own property.

Bob Bach, Grubb & Ellis

The level of paranoia about the economy and the financial markets is high and rising. Wasn’t it just a week or two ago that the financial media was trumpeting the threat of inflation due to the epic budget deficits? Now the discussion has pivoted to deflation, the role it played in Japan’s lost decade of the 1990s, and the potential for it to take root in the U.S.

The commercial real estate investment market is dealing with two major ironies at this point in the cycle.

The story has become all too familiar for the commercial real estate investment market: no debt capital to refinance maturing loans on properties that may have no equity left, disappearing tenants and brutal concessions packages. But a new story is emerging.