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Looking for good news on the economy? It is still hard to find. Aside from McDonald’s, there are few companies making a profit. American Express Co. added 15 cents to $24.13 in Germany after the company won U.S. Federal Reserve approval to become a commercial bank, gaining access to government funds as credit- card defaults climb with economies slowing around the world. The Fed waived a 30-day waiting period on the application because of “the unusual and exigent circumstances affecting the financial markets,” Bloomberg reported. Circuit City and 17 of its affiliates filed for bankruptcy Monday. Both Starbucks Corp., which…

Fading consumer confidence is taking an increasing toll on retail executives’ fortitude. After a roller coaster of a year, the view of market conditions among shopping center executives’ is heading sharply south, according to the most recent monthly survey by the International Council of Shopping Centers, released last Wednesday.The organization’s benchmark barometer, measuring retail executives’ views of current business conditions and their six-month outlook, fell to a record low 31.1 percent in October. That rating is on a scale in which 50 percent represents unchanged conditions and anything lower indicates deterioration. The recent score also marks a 16 percent falloff…

The shaky economy has bruised the retail sector, as jittery consumers keep a tight rein on their expenditures and investors examine the market with a more cautious eye. To that end, third-quarter retail property sales transactions totaled $3.4 billion, a staggering, year-over-year drop of 80 percent, according to a Real Capital Analytics Inc. Capital Trends Monthly report. In fact, sales volume for the entire year will probably come in lower than that tallied during just the first half of 2007.The number of deals also fell considerably, down 70 percent from the same period a year ago, to 283. Of those,…

Brazil’s strong domestic demand is boosting hotel fundamentals and creating an abundance of development opportunities. Its increased sovereign credit rating has further opened the country to foreign institutional and private equity investors.The country is insulated from the economic slowdown felt elsewhere in the world. As such, investing in hotel real estate there presents a countercyclical investment opportunity. Faced with declining fundamentals in the United States and Western Europe, hotel investors and operators are aggressively looking to Brazil to expand their brands.New development presents the primary investment opportunity, as there is little existing product. Fourteen Brazilian cities host more than 1…

Announcements of major hotel projects have become rare this year, but an October 30th announcement that a $420 million Waldorf-Astoria Hotel & Residences will rise in Philadelphia illustrates that some blockbuster projects are still possible.The 670-foot-tall structure, slated to break ground in January 2010, will contain 175 guest rooms and 136 residences for sale, starting at $1 million. Gatehouse Capital Corp. and Mariner Commercial Properties Inc. are co-developers.Mariner Commercial president & CEO Tim Mahoney and Brook Lenfest acquired the site, at the northeast corner of 15th and Chestnut streets, in 2000, planning to build a 50-story condominium, Mahoney reported. The…

At midyear, 10,781 lodging projects and 1.8 million guest rooms were being developed worldwide. That is a record high and a 28 percent year-over-year jump for each metric, according to Lodging Econometrics’ inaugural “Global Construction Pipeline Report.” Forty-one percent, or 4,468 projects, are under construction, and 3,819 are scheduled to start in the next year, while 2,494 are in the early planning stages. Rooms under construction, 836,567, account for 46 percent of the pipeline, trailed by 561,538 rooms scheduled to start in the next 12 months and 421,381 that are in early planning stages.The global financial downturn, however, is clearly…

Conditions in the U.S. office market have turned very dour very quickly. We are thus far only getting a taste of what we know is coming. Vacancy rates are generally on the rise, but the latter half of the third quarter was far worse than the first half, meaning that much of the third-quarter data that has been released recently does not fully reflect the closing weeks of the quarter. We see the layoff announcements. We’ve watched major credit tenants essentially disappear from the map. Heck, we personally know the people who are no longer occupying those offices.We also know…

The financial services meltdown has and will continue to yield job losses in New York City, the financial capital of the United States. But in a recent CB Richard Ellis Investors Investment Research Quarterly report, Sabina Kalyan and Nadja Savic pose an interesting question: Will New York City’s office market fare worse than that of the world’s other financial capital, London?The report notes that the performance of the U.S. and U.K. economies has correlated closely during the past 40 years. Employment cycles in the cities’ financial and business services sector are also similar. Through the second quarter of this year,…

The U.S. office vacancy rate hit 14.1 percent in the third quarter, an upsurge of 50 basis points from the previous quarter, according to November Americas MarketView, a report by CB Richard Ellis Inc. director of research operations for the Americas Raymond Wong. That figure translates into almost 4 million square feet of negative absorption. Detroit, Dallas-Fort Worth and Phoenix each struggled, registering vacancy rates that surpassed 19 percent. On the other end of the spectrum, Manhattan, Honolulu and Miami featured the lowest vacancy rates, each less than 10 percent.“It is expected that most real estate occupancy decisions that can…

Before catching a break in 2010, the industrial sector will face a long, hard slog, according to a study released last week from RREEF America L.L.C., Deutsche Bank AG’s alternative investment management affiliate.By the end of 2009, industrial investors, owners and brokers may feel like the market has nowhere to go but up. The majority of industrial markets will stay in contraction or post-peak mode next year, the report indicated. Exceptions include Boston, San Diego and Portland, Ore., which are poised to get an early start on other major industrial markets and start recovery in 2009.Negative absorption will reach 24…