Business Specialties

A bright spot to kick off the Memorial Day holiday weekend, or economic fool’s gold? Time will tell, but in any case the Conference Board reported on Thursday that leading indicators of the U.S. economy posted their first rise since the summer of last year. The organization’s index of leading indicators, which is designed to predict economic activity six- to nine months in the future, rose 1 percent in April. The revised March figure was a 0.2 percent drop. Generally speaking, the index has been falling since late 2007, but according to the organization, the rate of decline has slowed…

Commercial real estate has had that sinking feeling all year so far, and on Wednesday the National Association of Realtors quantified things: brokerage activity in the commercial sector dropped 4.8 percent in 1Q09 compared with 4Q08. Compared with the first quarter of 2008, brokerage activity is down 12.9 percent. Moreover, the NAR is predicting down time for a while yet, since real estate is a lagging indicator behind a broader economy that’s still lagging itself. “Because commercial real estate always lags an overall economic recovery, it will take some time for the commercial real estate market to rebound,” said Lawrence…

In a major expansion of the Term Asset Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF), the Federal Reserve said on Tuesday that investors will be able to buy existing securities backed by commercial real estate loans–so-called “legacy” CMBS. The commercial real estate industry has been pushing for this for some time, and it will at last be possible starting in July. The crash of the CMBS market has created a very large storm on the horizon for commercial real estate, formed by loans that will need to be refinanced in the coming months and years with no way to do so, even…

SL Green Realty Corp. has jumped on the bandwagon of REITs that, facing credit markets that are frozen like a block of ice, have opted to raise funds through public offerings. The company, which is still New York City’s largest office landlord, just walked away with net proceeds of approximately $387.4 million after selling 19.55 million shares of common stock. SL Green’s shares were offered at $20.75 each, representing quite a premium over the company’s lowest share price of $7.75 within the last 12 months, but a far cry from the high point of $101.07 during that period. No commercial…

“Better than expected” is the latest turn of phrase commonly used to describe lousy performance by companies that isn’t quite as lousy as analysts predicted, and as such the phrase might have a longer shelf-life than “green shoots.” Since lousy is the new normal, then “better than expected” is what Wall Street now rewards. Few industries have a more lousy new normal than retail. Take the do-it-yourself chain Lowe’s Cos., for example. DIY is a retail subset that took it particularly hard even before the Panic of 2008 last fall, since it’s a business that develops pneumonia whenever the housing…

Hard times may have come to property development and construction, but that doesn’t mean that green building ideas have lost all of their momentum, in either public or private spheres. In public development, which includes examples of early adopters of green building techniques in the first place, various governments are still pushing hard for green. Late last week, the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R. 2187, also called the 21st Century Green High-Performing Public School Facilities Act, by a vote of 255 to 177. H.R. 2187 is a $6.4 billion school modernization bill with the specific goal of building new…

First-quarter numbers are in from Wal-Mart Stores Inc., and they show that the retail giant continues to attract recession-weary U.S. consumers, but other factors beyond its control have been keeping the retail behemoth from posting higher profits. According to the company, profit in its first fiscal quarter, which ended April 30, was about the same as a year earlier, $3.02 billion, or 77 cents a share. Not shabby, but not what Wall Street expected. The main drag on company profits was the fact that sales internationally were down 11 percent during the first quarter, affected by that curiously strong U.S….

The U.S. Department of Commerce reported that retail sales dropped by 0.4 percent in April, compared with the previous month. The decline was a little more than expected, but less than the revised March drop of 1.3 percent. The recent two months of decline followed unexpected increases in consumer spending in January and February. Gasoline sales, which sagged 2.3 percent in April as gas prices rose somewhat (and reminded drivers of the gas-price bubble of last summer), accounted for a fair chunk of the total decline. But for gas sales, the overall decline in retail sales would have been 0.2…

Commercial property prices sank by 5.8 percent in 1Q09, according to the MIT Center for Real Estate’s Transactions-Based Index, which saw its fourth quarterly drop in a row during the quarter. The index is now 21 percent lower than in 1Q08, and fully 26 percent below its peak in mid-2007. According to MIT, that drop is similar to the index’s 27 percent drop during the commercial property slump of the early 1990s. “It’s possible that the first quarter of 2009 was the nadir in market sentiment,” said David Geltner, director of research at the MIT Center for Real Estate, in…

American International Group is finally in the news for something other than being a multibillion-dollar black hole for the U.S. Treasury; namely, a property sale. The beleaguered insurer has inked a deal to sell the AIG Otemachi Building and a one-acre site in Tokyo to Nippon Life Insurance Co. AIG will receive about $1.2 billion in cash for the property–a drop in the vast AIG bucket, perhaps, but still a tidy sum. It is a choice bit of real estate. Not only is it in the traditionally expensive Tokyo market, the building overlooks the Imperial Palace, one of the few…