There’s no doubt that our country is experiencing very difficult economic times, and hotel performance generally reflects the downturn. When it comes to evaluating how well a hotel has performed compared to prior forecasts and expectations, many hotel owners face the same reoccurring discussions month after month.Because rooms are booked and billed on a daily basis, hotels experience daily market volatility directly. In essence, inventory marks to market every day. For hospitality asset managers, this complicates performance forecasting and requires more flexibility in adjusting business plans to accommodate uncertainty and increased economic volatility.As owners face more challenges in achieving their…

The Middle Eastern Kingdom of Bahrain, an archipelago of 33 islands situated in the Persian Gulf wants to reduce its reliance on oil revenues and is looking at tourism as an important way to diversify its economy.According to a report from Catalan Cighi, associate in HVS International’s Dubai office, and Hala Matar Choufany, managing director in the same office, Bahrain wants to increase its tourism revenues to 10 percent of GDP by 2014. Improving the country’s access to the outside world is one way of accomplishing that goal, and it has undertaken significant infrastructure improvement projects to further that initiative.The…

Recently, I made a $10 bet with a Grubb & Ellis broker who thinks that only half the nation’s office space will be occupied within five years—a 50 percent vacancy rate! It’s not due to “The Great Depression Ahead” (if you are a fan of Harry Dent). The broker thinks that half of us will be working from our homes with the assistance of high-speed Internet connections and other communications technology, saving big bucks on office occupancy costs for our employers. This is not a new argument. In a Grubb & Ellis forecast report from the mid-1990s, I questioned whether…

The continuing recession has translated to growing office vacancy in central business districts across the country. Dallas, though, has been exception, as vacancy fell from 27.6 percent to 27.2 percent at the end of the first quarter, according to a Cushman & Wakefield Inc. report Not a huge decrease, to be sure, but Randy Cooper, executive director in the company’s Dallas office, believes that these numbers are more proof that office tenants are favoring locations in the CBD, which encompasses the Uptown and Downtown submarkets.That was not always the case, Cooper said. Many of the large, 1 million-square-foot office buildings…

Los Angeles County’s industrial sector experienced the largest amount of negative net absorption in the first quarter compared to all other industrial markets, with negative 8.8 million square feet. This is the largest quarterly hit to occupied space in the metropolitan area since the first quarter of 1990. This contraction in demand for industrial space increased the availability rate by 100 basis points for the quarter to 6.5 percent. The current economic turmoil is having a large effect on one of the nation’s largest industrial markets. The port is at a standstill, given the drop-off in trade activity, with both…

Hundreds or thousands of miles from the nation’s powerful coastal ports, second-tier industrial markets sometimes seem overlooked. But a handful of locations, most in the nation’s heartland, held their ground or improved occupancy during the first quarter compared to the same period of 2008.In 13 of 53 markets served by Colliers International affiliates, year-over-year industrial vacancy held steady or improved. Leading the list is Little Rock, Ark., which enjoyed the biggest vacancy drop of any industrial market surveyed by Colliers, from 17.2 percent to 10.6 percent. Cleveland trimmed its rate from 8.1 percent to 7.5 percent. In Memphis, vacancy dropped…

A major part of the federal government’s $800 billion economic stimulus package will be devoted to construction projects to improve the nation’s infrastructure, but a recent Center for Housing Policy study found that many of the jobs created by these construction projects will pay insufficient incomes to enable workers to afford rental housing in many U.S. markets.The study covered rental rates of two-bedroom apartments, as well as single-family homes. Typical rents in each metropolitan area are based on the fiscal year 2009 compared to the 2007 Fair Market Rents issued by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, effectively comparing…

Kimco Realty Corp. is the latest REIT to snag a successful refinancing for a trophy property. On Friday, Cushman & Wakefield Sonnenblick Goldman said that it had secured a $100 million refinancing for the REIT’s Suburban Square, a 360,000-square-foot retail center in Ardmore, Pa., an affluent Philadelphia suburb. Details on terms were not immediately available. However, the transaction appears to dovetail with Kimco’s stated strategy of identifying financing sources that enable it to minimize its use of bank lines of credit. So far this year, Kimco has obtained secured debt commitments valued at $212 million, closed $106 million in secured…