Is the Commercial Office Market Recovery a Mirage?
January 13, 2015
by Keith Jurow
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My previous article examined the dangers of widespread euphoria and optimism. In this article, I will focus on an important question few analysts are raising: Is the so-called recovery in commercial office markets real or a mirage?
According to Marcus & Millichap’s Third Quarter 2014 Commercial Real Estate Investment Outlook, optimism for those investors surveyed has never been higher.
Take a good look at this chart showing the intention of these investors over the next 12 months.
You can see that less than 5% of those surveyed plan to decrease their commercial real estate portfolios. More than 70% intend to increase their holdings.
The crash that was cut short
Let’s first examine the post-financial crisis history of the commercial real estate market and the supply and demand forces now at play.
After Lehman Brothers failed in the fall of 2008, the entire banking system was in danger of a complete collapse. Federal regulatory authorities and the Treasury Department decided that something drastic had to be done to stabilize the banks.
The solution provided by the Federal Accounting Standards Board (FASB) was to rewrite the standards for when banks had to write down impaired loans. Banks were required to write down only those loans that were suffering “other than temporary impairments.” Who decided which loans met this standard? The banks did of course.
In late 2009, the FDIC modified its policy to encourage what it called “prudent commercial loan workouts.” The banks understood what this meant and began a policy of loan modifications that contemptuously became known as “extend and pretend.”
One could argue that the regulators had no choice. The total commercial loan portfolio for all US banks stood at $1.55 trillion at the peak of the bubble in 2007. Hundreds of billions of dollars of the worst underwritten loans of 2006-2007 quickly went underwater. Because smaller and mid-size banks had loaded their portfolios with commercial real estate, an imminent collapse of hundreds of those banks was a real possibility.
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