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Eight Must Reads for the CRE Industry Today (May 17, 2022)

The Biden administration is preparing steps to address the housing shortage in the U.S., reports The Wall Street Journal. Class-A office space is more in demand than ever, according to Commercial Observer. These are among today’s must reads from around the commercial real estate industry.

  1. Biden Administration Targets Housing Supply Shortage “The Biden administration on Monday plans to announce steps aimed at addressing the U.S. shortage of entry-level homes, including expanding federally backed financing for affordable housing and directing grants toward localities that encourage construction. Each regulatory move is technical and modest, though the administration hopes they will collectively dent the estimated shortage of millions of homes over the coming years.” (The Wall Street Journal)
  2. Nations Aim to Secure Supply Chains by Turning Offshoring into ‘Friend-Shoring’ “As war and the pandemic expose the fragility of supply chains, the U.S. and its allies are pursuing a new kind of global trade, one that confines commerce to a circle of trusted nations. Fans call the shift ‘friend-shoring.’ The new strategy is a departure from economic globalization of recent decades, when businesses bought and made products where costs were low and free-trade policies made moving goods around the world cheaper and faster.” (The Wall Street Journal)
  3. NAREIT T-Tracker: Quarterly Performance Series “Leverage ratios remained low: Debt to book assets declined to 49.7% and debt to market assets was at 27.6%. Interest coverage stayed steady at 6.1 times, the same as it was in the fourth quarter of 2021.” (REIT.com)
  4. Flight to Quality Reached the Moon in 2022 “Class A office space was one of the clear commercial real estate winners of the pandemic. COVID-19 emptied most office space both nationally and in New York City, and most of it still remains empty on any given weekday, according to security firm Kastle Systems, which tracks access swipes at office buildings in major U.S. markets. This exodus in early 2020 killed demand for space and damaged the investment value of office properties.” (Commercial Observer)
  5. Self-Storage Still Rising Amid Pandemic Surge “Self storage is seeing sustained demand with about 50 million square feet of space expected to be delivered in 2022, per RentCafe.” (The Real Deal)
  6. Macquarie Targets $2.5Bn for Global Real Estate Fund “The Australian firm also plans to make new hires to bolster its third-party capital management and fundraising capabilities in opportunistic real estate.” (PERE)
  7. Meet the Real Estate Professionals Who Switched into Politics in 2021 “New year, new mayor. And, in a surprise twist, 2021 saw a new governor when Kathy Hochul took the reins of New York state from Andrew Cuomo after he resigned in disgrace. The dual transitions of power led to a shift in some of the appointed officials charged with leading New York City’s committees, commissions and public corporations — with many of them coming from real estate backgrounds.” (Commercial Observer)
  8. As Inflation Spikes, Oakland Reconsiders a Record 6.7% Rent Hike “After two years of pandemic turmoil, should landlords or tenants pick up the tab for economic uncertainty?” (San Francisco Chronicle)
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