Crash Survival Zone

Malls, those ubiquitous shopping meccas that sprang up in the 1950s, are dwindling in number, with many struggling properties reduced to largely vacant shells.

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With their maze of walkways and fast-food courts, malls have long been an iconic, if sometimes unsightly, presence in the American retail landscape. A few were made famous by their sheer size, [...]

As you try to sort whether commercial real estate is indeed the next “shoe to drop” (as everyone’s saying) here’s a little more chartology, prepared by Pasquale Cardone at Realpoint, showing just how fast CRE loans are going sour.You can see it’s basically quadrupled since the crisis started last autumn, and at this rate, it’s [...]

First, the housing market tanked. Now, a shakeout has roiled the commercial-property market. Separating the winners from the losers.

Americans in the past two years have been closely watching residential real estate, as TV commentators breathlessly relate each downward tick in home prices and upward move in foreclosures. But all the while, another important part of [...]

Vacancies surged at U.S. strip malls in the first quarter and set a record at U.S. regional malls, as the deterioration in the retail real estate sector accelerated, according to real estate research firm Reis.

Barring a significant economic change, Reis does not expect vacancies to stabilize until sometime in the middle of 2012 if an [...]

Slowdown Signals A Static Horizon
Over the past decade, as new corporate headquarters, condominiums and subdivisions mushroomed across the region, developers relied on architects to turn their big-money musings into the lines, angles and dimensions that are the language of their craft.

Now, as banks have stopped financing construction, development projects are in limbo and architectural firms [...]

Billionaire investor George Soros said U.S. commercial real estate will probably drop at least 30 percent in value, causing further strains on banks.

“Commercial real estate has not yet fallen in value,” Soros, speaking at a forum in Washington, said. “It is inevitable, it is written, everybody knows it, there are already some transactions which reflect [...]

A “black hole” in the US commercial property market is set to put further pressure on troubled banks, the head of leading private equity firm Apollo Management has warned.

Leon Black, founder of the firm, said the extra costs of cleaning up the US banking industry could total as much as $2,000bn, putting further strain on [...]

U.S. mortgage rates may fall to the lowest since World War II on the Federal Reserve’s plan to buy up to $300 billion of Treasuries and increase purchases of mortgage-backed bonds.

Rates for 30-year fixed home loans dropped to 4.98 percent this week, Freddie Mac said today. They may reach 4.5 percent as the Fed’s purchases [...]

How will the recession affect the green-building market? We asked Peter Morris, principal of the construction consultancy Davis Langdon

Proponents of green buildings have a long list of persuasive arguments they can use to convince clients and developers that green is the way to go: Build green, and your employees will be healthier, happier, and more [...]

Foreclosure notices on U.S. properties in January rose 18% from a year earlier while they fell 10% from December, RealtyTrac reported.

Foreclosure filings, which include default notices, auction-sale notices, and bank repossessions, totaled 274,399 in the month.

And one in every 466 U.S. housing units was the subject of a filing, the Irvine, Calif., online real-estate-data provider [...]