GeneG posted on June 24, 2009 14:13
Commercial real estate prices fell 8.6 percent in April, Moody’s Investors Service reports.
Moody’s Managing Director Nick Levidy says the decline reflects deals that closed in late 2008 and early 2009 when the market was at its most troubled.
Levidy speculates that the falling prices suggest that buyers are adapting to the realities of the declining market. He predicts that more distress sales are on the way.
Richard Parkus, Deutsche Bank head of Commercial Mortgage-backed Securities and Asset-Backed Securities Synthetics Research, says U.S. commercial real estate values may fall by more than 50 percent compared to prices in 2007 and will probably take six to eight years to recover.
"We are not only not approaching stability, we are at a period of maximum deterioration," Parkus says.
Source: Reuters, Ilaina Jonas, and The Wall Street Journal, Jay Miller (06/22/2009)