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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)
  

Q3 2009 LoopLocal Insight Reports were recently released for 39 markets nationwide, showing sales trends for each of the five major property types. Today we checked out asking prices for industrial listings in Los Angeles County on LoopNet and noticed a decline of 12.4% since Q3 2008 and 3.6% since Q2 2009.



According to the Institute for Supply Management's most recent national Report on Business "Economic activity in the manufacturing sector expanded in September for the second consecutive month, and the overall economy grew for the fifth consecutive month, say the nation's supply executives in the latest Manufacturing ISM Report On Business®."

When will these early indicators start to impact industrial property values, rents and deal volume in LA? What about other markets? Is the industrial property market different from 6 months ago? If so, how?

The Institute for Supply Management's full national Report on Business can be found here:
http://www.ism.ws/ismreport/mfgrob.cfm
http://www.ism.ws/files/ISMReport/ROB102009.pdf

This new monthly digital newsletter from GlobeSt.com is devoted solely to the distressed assets marketplace providing field-level guidance on the acquisition and disposition of distressed assets in all regions, all sectors and all values.

Check it out if you haven't seen it yet. Lots of good articles.

Read the Oct 2009 Premier Issue (Adobe Flash required)

The next time you run a search, you should notice a significant improvement in speed.

It's that time again when we stay late at the office to roll out some new enhancements to LoopNet.

We're super excited about tonight's release. More about it in a few hours.

It's going to be a long night but we've stocked up on what looks like every energy-boosting-but-extremely-unhealthy snack we could think of to get us through it.

Anyone ever try Easy Cheese on a Twinkie?

After a bunch of research and conversations with brokers across the country, we're pleased to introduce new submarket, market and region classifications for LoopNet lease listings.

Run an advanced search for lease, to search for properties by the new submarkets.

If you're currently marketing a property for lease on LoopNet, we've reclassified it into the new submarkets. Edit your listing to see what submarket it is in. You can also change it to a nearby one if you find a better match.

Our Research team has been working with local brokers across the country to come up with these the new submarkets, markets, and regions. But we realize that you may disagree with the classifications. If you have any feedback, please let us know. We intend to keep updating this information until we get it perfect.

Thousands of people search LoopNet.com every day for commercial real estate for sale or lease. If you visit our offices, you'll see a large LCD screen on the wall that visualizes 1) where people are searching from, 2) where they are searching, and 3) where they are viewing listings... all in real-time! This video only captures 1 minute of activity on a Thursday afternoon from the 920,000 visitors to LoopNet every month. Kind of mesmerizing, isn't it?

Has YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, or a blog strengthened your business? Tell CIRE magazine
Commercial Investment Real Estate magazine is looking for CCIMs who are active on YouTube, Twitter, Flickr and other social media platforms to provide feedback for an upcoming feature article. Has your blog or Facebook page helped you connect with a client? Have you used YouTube or Flickr to spark a deal-making opportunity? If you’re reaping the professional benefits of these tools — or if you remain skeptical about their effectiveness — we’d like to hear from you. Please send a brief but detailed reply to rrosfelder@cciminstitute.com.