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Ahead of Ourselves

By Paul Bubny

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I’ve gotten both encouraging and disquieting news on the investment sales front lately. Our friends at Real Capital Analytics tell us volume in 2010 rose 140% to $41.6 billion from the low point of $17.3 billion a year earlier, with some key markets seeing volume rebounds of 300% or more. That may still be off substantially from the market’s peak, but it’s up even more dramatically from the trough.

Pricing is also staging a comeback; we’ve even seen a few high-profile examples of assets trading at dollar amounts comparable to peak levels. Some industry observers, like MIT’s David Geltner, have pointed out lately that institutional demand has begun spreading beyond trophies in the CBDs of New York, Boston or San Francisco into non-trophy assets in those cities or better-quality properties in secondary markets.

Behind all these indicators, you can see a recovery gathering steam. Yet I have to wonder what’s behind assets trading for 2006-like prices when it’s not actually 2006.

Partly it’s due to the law of supply and demand. There are only so many class A properties on the market at any time, and at present there aren’t nearly enough to feed all the hungry mouths clamoring for them. “If we had five times the number of buildings to sell, we’d sell five times as many buildings,” is how Robert Knakal, chairman of New York City-based Massey Knakal Realty Services, put it at a media briefing last month.

But there’s also what Sam Chandan, chief economist at RCA, calls the “decoupling” between pricing and fundamentals, especially in core markets. Liquidity flows most easily to the markets that look especially good to investors and lenders. That’s the story at any point in the cycle, yet when capital supply is stronger than rent growth, you may be looking at a mini-bubble. And the fundamentals driving demand for space aren’t there yet, although they have improved, more so in some markets than others. (Think Boston on the one hand, Detroit on the other.)

I’ve heard arguments on the other side of the bubble question, too. Compared to treasuries, for example, yields on commercial real estate still look pretty attractive, say those who don’t see a pricing bubble forming. And we’re a long way from the “irrational exuberance” of the market’s peak, as neither lenders nor investors today are letting rose-colored pro formas drive their decisions. Nobody’s giddy enough to pay top dollar in 2011 for an out-of-the-way suburban campus that’s 50% vacant.

Yet as opportunity-starved investors look beyond office assets that represent either stable income or obvious upside, we may be getting ahead of ourselves. How do you see pricing today? Let us know.

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