Showing posts with label cre. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cre. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Local Commercial Real Estate Woes

There's a brand new waterfront development on Boston's South Shore - The Launch at Hingham Shipyard.

It's an empty ghost-town - save for one new Bed, Bath, and Beyond which is doomed from the start. It's in trouble because it's essentially a stone's throw from a now vacant Linen's-N-Things.

So there're all these pretty buildings just sitting there, no doubt with 2006-type debt loads.





CRE is not my gig. Nonetheless I think I can read the listing for the office property a bit.

$30 per square foot, per year times 30,000....

That's $900,000 in total yearly rent....divided by 12 gives:

$75,000 in monthly rent. I wonder how high that is for such space in this area?

Note Midtown Manhattan has dropped from $150 per square foot two years ago to $40-$50 per square foot - at least on a sublet basis. If Manhattan has dropped to that level, I just don't see how this place will command $30 a foot. But, again, I know very little about this business except that the banks who fronted the money are in for a world of hurt.

If we assume that $900,000 is needed to pay the annual debt service on the office building above....we next assume the interest rate at which some Moronic bank gave away the money - which we can use to extrapolate the total loan amount.

Cut that number at least in half and we can figure the dollar loss for the bank. I'm sure it's $7-$9 million alone on this one building - and counting!

Now about the probable loss on the retail space (first pic) which is 8 times as big....whoops!

There's a perception out there that commercial real estate up here in the Northeast is nowhere near as bad as in places like Florida, Arizona, and Michigan.

But I bet that's not entirely true. There's essentially no economy here except the oxymoronical Government Economy. In Massachusetts, if you can't convince a medical professional (or Dunkin Donuts) to lease your space you're pretty much screwed. And this area is slowly losing population.

You gotta love the pictures on The Launch's website:



Imaginary people shopping at imaginary leased stores!

Meanwhile, the banks imagine their loans are worth 100 cents on the dollar....

Wednesday, April 01, 2009

SRS Fundamentals



That's merely one page of a fifty page report you can read here.

Of course, none of this is news to us SRS holders....

See also - On The SRS.