After a strong Friday on the stock market, stocks dropped slightly on Monday. Most market experts believe that the drop was solely due to investors locking in profits that have been made over the last few months. To go along with that theory, bond prices were up on Monday.
All four of the most common stock indexes fell between 0.1% and 0.4%. The Russell 2000 fell .01% to finish the day at 571.87. Both the Dow Jones and the S&P 500 fell 0.3%, with the Dow finishing at 9,337.95 and the S&P at 1,007.10. The Nasdaq composite index saw the biggest …read more

Commercial property rental rates continued to fall internationally in the first quarter of 2009 according RICS’s Global Commercial Property Survey. This quarterly survey tracks sentiment among property professionals around the world.
Globally, respondents expect continued decline in the coming three months. US real estate professionals were among the most pessimistic of all survey respondents regarding the near term price outlook. Demand from tenants is down and therefore available space is up, compounding to drive rates down and forcing commercial real estate agents to offer increasingly larger incentive packages in order to secure a deal.
One possible silver lining is that re-pricing in …read more

Reis, a real estate research firm, said that the average apartment rent across the country rose 1.1 percent in the second quarter of this year to $994 a month.

The operators of real estate schools — which help train future real estate agents — are seeing attendance at their facilities dropping.

According to this story by Financial Week writer Frank Byrt, retail vacancies are at a 12-year high. Office vacancy rates are beginning to rise, too.

It’s hard to find anything positive to say about the residential real estate market. That’s not the case, though, with the commercial and multi-family side of the real estate industry.

Sometimes I forget that the housing slump is not only impacting real estate professionals along with buyers and sellers, but other industries, too.

Three writers at the Wall Street Journal recently wrote an interesting story on those condo/hotels that were built, reporting that many of the buyers who’ve purchased individual condominium units aren’t happy with their investment. They’ve made far less money off rentals than they expected, and their units aren’t appreciating as quickly as they had hoped.

Another high-profile major bank has fallen victim to the nation’s mortgage crisis.

Mirroring the problems in the residential real estate industry, the demand for commercial real estate is also mired in a big slump.