From a small northwestern observatory…

First, a happy 4th of July to all of our U.S. readers!  I’ve spent the day catching up on reading, writing, and napping.  I hope you’ve all done the same.

Part of my reading was a recent piece by Calvin Schnure for the members at NAREIT titled Commercial Property Prices Continue Steady Gains.  It’s an interesting read, and factually correct.  However, Mr. Schnure and I might arrive at somewhat different conclusions.  Case in point is illustrated by the graphic below, taken from his article:

Now, if you are running a REIT and want to convince potential investors that the world is rosy, then this is a very pretty graphic. On the other hand, if you are a real estate analyst (ahem…. please hold your applause) you have to wonder what the heck is going on here.  I’m particularly concerned with multi-family, which has increased in value on the order of about 60% since the previous peak (December, 2007) but is up by something close to 160% since the trough of 8 years ago.  Yeah.  That’s a huge run-up.  Couple that with the observations (anecdotal, at present) that multi-family vacancies are on the rise nationwide, and particularly, surprisingly, in formerly hot markets like Seattle (just to name names).

I’m not preaching a long-term or even intermediate term demise for multi-family.  Far from it, in the long term, these are still worth considering.  However, in the short-term, these annualized gains may not be sustainable.

By the way, there’s a lot more in the NAREIT article, and it’s worth reading in its entirety.

Watch this space.  We’ll keep you posted.