Sometimes storm clouds are just heavily overcast skies, with no precipitation in site. That is roughly what MCSI recently said about the industrial CRE market.
Not that everything was rosy. "Deal activity fell less from a year ago for the industrial sector than for any other property sector," according to the report. "However, the shallower decline was driven in part by a one-time event in August that made the pace of deal activity look healthier than it really was."
That may still sound bad, but one of the difficulties in analyzing a lot of CRE business is an inherent flaw in a year-over-year analysis. As MCSI notes, "A 48% YOY decline might make one think that conditions in the market are bleak, but in a relative sense, life is good in the industrial sector. The sale of individual assets averaged $4.1b for each August over the years 2015 to 2019. So the $4.2b pace seen in August of this year is back to the averages seen before the pandemic. The decline just reflects that there was a period of excess liquidity in 2021 and 2022 when interest rates were low and investors were hungry for any sort of yielding assets."
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GlobeSt.com has also previously reported that year-over-year comparisons can be misleading. CRE sales for the first half of 2023 were $137 billion. Compare that to the first half of 2022 — $306 billion. That would make 2023 a drop of $169 billion, or 55.2%, from 2022. It seems like a complete disaster. But the same year-to-date transaction volume across a 10-year average was $130 billion. In that context, 2023 is a 5.4% increase over the average.
Plus, compared to other property types, the decline of industrial is "modest," as it's down only 1.9% from 2022. "The RCA CPPI National All-Property Index, by comparison, fell 9.9% from a year earlier in August because of more pain in other sectors," they wrote. "Cap rates are adjusting upward, averaging 5.7% for the month of August. This figure was up 50 bps from a year earlier, which was the low point for cap rates in this cycle. Mortgage rates for commercial properties, by contrast, have increased 330 bps to 6.9% in July of this year from the lows seen in this cycle."
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