[Editors] MIT Index: Commercial properties continue decline
Teresa Herbert
therbert at MIT.EDU
Tue Aug 5 11:08:42 EDT 2008
For Immediate Release
TUESDAY, AUG. 5, 2008
Contact: Teresa Herbert, MIT News Office
T. 617-258-5403 E.: therbert at mit.edu
======================================
MIT price index for commercial properties continues decline in Q2
--Office properties show biggest decline
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CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Transaction sale prices of commercial property sold
by major institutional investors declined 2.7 percent overall in the
second quarter of 2008 with prices for office properties declining 5.5
percent, according to an index produced by the MIT Center for Real
Estate.
The office sector encountered the largest drop in the quarterly
transaction-based index (TBI) in a single quarter since 1994,
following minor declines in the past two quarters. The decline reduces
office property prices to their early 2007 level.
The 2.7 percent decline in the overall quarterly TBI means that prices
for properties such as shopping malls, apartment complexes, office
buildings and warehouses are now more than 9 percent below peak values
attained in mid-2007.
“The down movement this quarter in the overall prices represents the
third down quarter out of the last four quarters in the index. This
represents a continuation of the correction in commercial property
market prices that began last fall — a correction triggered by the
credit crunch caused by the subprime housing mortgage crisis and
fueled by concerns about a recession,” said Professor David Geltner,
research director of the MIT/CRE.
Geltner said, however, that commercial properties, which produce
regular income and serve as a major investment asset class, are
generally in much better shape than housing. They are still
experiencing good fundamental performance in terms of strong income,
good occupancy, low commercial mortgage delinquency, and substantial
equity capital interested in buying such property.
Geltner noted, nevertheless, that the generally positive fundamentals
that currently shore up commercial property are still subject to the
threat of a severe economic downturn.
“The biggest threat would be a major recession,” he said.
The current declines are consistent with a previously reported
widening disconnect between buyers and sellers. The MIT/CRE publishes
not only the price index based on closed deals, which declined 2.7
percent, but also compiles indices that separately track movements on
the demand side and the supply side of the property market.
The demand-side index tracks the changes in prices that potential
buyers are willing to pay (sometimes called a “constant-liquidity”
index of the market, because it tracks how much prices would have to
change to keep a constant ability to sell as many properties at the
same rate of trading volume). That index has now fallen steadily for
all of the past four quarters, falling again in the second quarter by
the same 2.7 percent as the realized price index. During the past four
quarters, the cumulative decline in potential buyers’ prices is more
than 17 percent versus their mid-2007 peak.
The supply side of the market — the property owners who are the
potential sellers —matched the demand-side movement in the second
quarter, also revising their willingness-to-sell prices downward by
2.7 percent, and this lock-step movement kept the overall sales volume
tracked by the index nearly constant, at the historically low levels
reached earlier in 2008.
Henry Pollakowski, MIT/CRE senior economist and co-director of the
Center’s Commercial Real Estate Data Laboratory (CREDL), noted that
the gap represents “a second consecutive quarter of historically low
trading volume.”
“This quarter at least shows a pause in any further pulling away of
supply from demand such as we had seen in the first quarter,”
Pollakowski said. “The result of this continuation of the relationship
between supply and demand is that the volume of closed transactions
tracked by the index remained low this quarter after falling
drastically by 47 percent from the last quarter of 2007 to the first
quarter of 2008.”
Geltner noted that: “The results posted by our index are corroborated
by recent evidence from another commercial property price index whose
methodology was developed at the MIT/CRE, the Moody’s/REAL Index
produced by Moody’s Investors Service, which showed a decline of 3.5
percent in its latest monthly report, for May, placing that broader
index of realized commercial property prices at about 9 percent below
its 2007 peak, very similar to the NCREIF-based index reported here.”
The TBI tracks the prices that institutions such as pension funds pay
or receive when transacting properties such as shopping malls,
apartment complexes and office towers. The MIT Center’s TBI is based
on prices of National Council of Real Estate Investment Fiduciaries
(NCREIF) properties sold each quarter from the property database that
underlies the NCREIF Property Index (NPI), and also makes use of the
appraisal information for all of the currently 6,000 NCREIF
properties. Such an index — national, quarterly, transaction-based and
by property type — had not been previously constructed prior to MIT’s
development of it in 2006. NCREIF supported development of the index
as a useful tool for research and decision-making in the industry.
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