By Carol Ryan Banks are getting stingy with commercial property mortgages. Ideally, alternative lenders could step in and help landlords to refinance their debts, but this part of the lending market isn’t in great shape either. Loans for the property industry are drying up fast. The CBRE Lending Momentum Index, a proxy for U.S. commercial real estate lending, fell 54% […]
By Andy Medici – Senior Reporter, The Playbook, The Business Journals Small-business loans are becoming both harder to get and more expensive — and that combination is expected to get worse. While we previously have written about the tightening credit market — driven in part by the Federal Reserve’s sustained interest rate increases over the last year — […]
The delinquency rate on office building-related mortgage bonds spiked in May, per a report from Trepp, Emily writes. The big picture: Investors have been watching for this to happen since last summer — and May’s move may represent a “tipping point,” the data provider said in a note. State of play: The office space market is in a tough spot […]
By Andy Medici – Senior Reporter, The Playbook, The Business Journals Small-business owners are worried about how long they could survive a potential recession, but many believe AI tools like ChatGPT could help them weather an economic downturn. A survey of 700 business owners by B2B Reviews found about 25% of businesses believe they couldn’t last more than […]
By: Paul Bubny The Green Street Commercial Property Price Index decreased by 0.1% in April. The index, which tracks the pricing of institutional-quality commercial real estate, has fallen by 15% since property prices peaked a year ago. “Prospective sellers may refuse to accept it, but that doesn’t change the fact that the bid price […]
By Kate King A growing number of retailers in city office districts are relocating their businesses to the suburbs, where visits to shopping centers are on the rise as fewer people commute to downtown workplaces. With average office usage rates still only around half of where they stood before the pandemic in many major cities, many bars, restaurants and other […]
Consumers barely kept up with inflation in April, as retail sales increased but fell short of expectations, the Commerce Department reported Tuesday. The advanced sales report showed an increase of 0.4%, below the Dow Jones estimate for 0.8%. Excluding auto-related figures, sales increased 0.4%, which was in line with expectations. As the numbers are not adjusted for […]
By James McCown CAMBRIDGE — “In the city there must be regularity and fantasy, relationships and oppositions, and casual and unexpected elements to vary the scene,” wrote Marc-Antoine Laugier, an 18th-century Jesuit and arguably the world’s first architecture critic, having penned the seminal Essai Sur l’Architecture in 1753. His advice holds true today. Cities must be […]
Nate Delesline III Reporter Ikea is expanding its store formats beyond its familiar and famous big blue box locations. The Swedish-founded and Netherlands-based international retailer had about 370 flagship stores globally, and 460 stores overall in 62 markets worldwide as of February. But despite that global presence, “many people were complaining that our stores were too far […]
By Nathaniel Meyersohn, CNN In the 1980s, a new type of specialty retail chain started to emerge: “category killers.” The stores’ powerhouse business model was aimed at giving shoppers access to every different size, style and color of a product imaginable – all in one place and at reduced prices. Category killers, which began to dominate […]
