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Transaction prices of commercial property sold by major institutional investors rose by more than 4 percent in the third quarter of 2009, according to an index developed and published by the MIT Center for Real Estate (MIT/CRE). The 4.4 percent increase in the transactions-based index (TBI) for the third quarter is the first positive price change in the index in over a year. “The big news this quarter is not just that the price index increased, but that transaction volume substantially increased for the second quarter in a row, reflecting the first increase in market sentiment in two years,” said Professor David Geltner, director of research at MIT/CRE. “One quarter does not a trend make, and we are still well below normal trading volume,” Geltner cautioned. “Nevertheless, this is the strongest sign of a bottom that we’ve had in two years,” he added.

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When cut by role, investors are slightly more pessimistic, with a median expectation of recovery timing that is approximately one quarter later than that of brokers or owners.

Pricing
Despite the declines in pricing seen over the past quarter, respondents’ expectations for future pricing declines remain almost unchanged from the last survey. At the beginning of Q3, 52% of respondents expected to see future declines of 11% or more. At the beginning of Q4, that number is 53%. This suggests that future expectations of cash flow and value have continued to deteriorate, preventing pricing from stabilizing even after the declines in Q3.

All three groups surveyed—investors, brokers and owners—expect pricing to drop. Owners are the most optimistic, with nearly 20% saying prices have already bottomed. While this may suggest some continuing issues with the bid-ask spread, the average expected price declines are within a few percentage points across all three groups.



What are your impressions? Does this data match with your expectations? What are you seeing in your local markets? Please comment and let us know.


LoopNet Commericial Real Estate Survey -

The average asking price per unit for multifamily property on LoopNet in Los Angeles County had a slight uptick in the third quarter. The 0.89% increase, marked the first time in four quarters that prices did not decline.



Last month, an article in The Wall Street Journal Online reported the sale of The Gallery at NoHo Commons, a 438-unit apartment complex in North Hollywood, for $96 million indicating that deals are available in the multifamily sector. To be fair, the article also highlighted several risks related to investing in multifamily, namely the drop in transaction volume nationwide and the potential that apartment vacancies continue to decline if the economy doesn’t rebound.

But the article goes on to say that:

Opportunities for such higher returns in apartments have begun to attract some investors who previously retreated to other perceived safer investments such as Treasury bonds after the recession hit. … Apartment buildings are clearly producing higher returns than they used to. In 2007, the so-called capitalization rates of apartment buildings, derived by dividing a building's net operating income by the price paid, were 5.8%. Today they have risen to 7.1%, according to Real Capital Analytics, a New York real-estate research firm.

But some people think a recovery for apartments is likely in 2011. If the job market stabilizes in 2010, younger workers are likely to be the first to be hired back because they are cheaper to employ, the theory goes. Since many of those people are renters, that is going to drive the apartment recovery, says Victor Calanog, director of research for Reis. (Read the Full Article )

So what do you think? Does this signal the end of the price decline or was it just an anomaly? Share your thoughts.

Read the entire interview from Real Property Alpha. Have you adopted social media?

From Gary Hayes, creator of this widget:

More about the Count - I quickly built and coded the app based on data culled from a range of social media sources & sites at the end of Sept 2009. The design will be finessed and I will be adding extra functionality (such as week, month & year lookahead/backs plus dynamic data input).

The social web has exploded in the last year and below are some of the key data points that the ‘Gary’s Social Media Count’ is based on (many will be updated!).

• 20 hours of video uploaded every minute onto YouTube (source YouTube blog Aug 09)
• Facebook 600k new members per day, and photos, videos per month, 700mill & 4 mill respectively (source Inside Facebook Feb 09)
• Twitter 18 million new users per year & 4 million tweets sent daily (source TechCrunch Apr 09)
• iPolicy UK – SMS messaging has a bright future (Aug 09)
• 900 000 blogs posts put up every day (source Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2008)
• YouTube daily, 96 million videos watched, $1mill bandwidth costs (source Comscore Jul 06 !)
• UPDATE: YouTube 1Billion watched per day SMH (2009)- counter updated!
• Second Life 250k virtual goods made daily, text messages 1250 per second (source Linden Lab release Sep 09)
• Money – $5.5 billion on virtual goods (casual & game worlds) even Facebooks gifts make $70 million annually (source Viximo Aug 09)
• Flickr has 73 million visitors a month who upload 700 million photos (source Yahoo Mar 09)
• Mobile social network subscribers – 92.5 million at the end of 2008, by end of 2013 rising to between 641.6-873.1 million or 132 mill annually (source Informa PDF)
• SMS – Over 2.3 trillion messages will be sent across major markets worldwide in 2008 (sourceEverysingleoneofus sms statistics)