Grant's Interest Rate Observer Summer Issue

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Aug 28, 2011
Jim Grant’s summer issue of the Interest Rate Observer is available for free on Grant’s website. Below is a brief excerpt:

In Houston, office rents are falling again, fully a decade after the Texas energy business stopped inflating and began deflating. Rents continue to fall in New York, too, and Citibank is reportedly trying to sell the mortgage it holds on 40 Wall St. at a distress price. The amount that Citi is owed on the 70-story building, once a holding of the late, great Ferdinand Marcos, is $80 million. The amount that it is willing to accept in payment, according to Crain’s New York Business, is $20 million, or $20 a square foot. A source of ours relates that the offered side of the market is, in fact, lower; a spokeswoman for Citicorp declines to provide a number. If the cost of refurbishing the building to attract an institutional clientele is anything like $100 million (as Crain’s reports), the building’s true, economic value might well be less than zero. It would certainly be low enough to rattle the downtown real estate community. Real estate is an admittedly slow and illiquid asset, but it isn’t in every postwar cycle that tall buildings collapse on the heads of the billionaires who own them. Recently, David Shulman of Salomon Brothers predicted that the slump in commercial real estate may last, in some regions, until the end of the decade and that it will be 12 years before the national office vacancy rate returns to 5% from about 20% today. To equity investors who have become accustomed to measuring bear markets in terms of days, weeks or months, such a thing is almost beyond imagining.

Precedent is on Shulman’s side, however, and the documentary evidence is available at the New York Public Library. One instructive story is that of the Equitable Building, 120 Broadway, a still-magnificent Wall Street skyscraper built in 1914-15. We’ve been reading up on the Equitable’s past to try to reach a clearer understanding of the future. What we want to know is whether the real estate-related credit cycle is over or ending, or, as Shulman and others suggest, still unfolding. The answer to that question is easy: It is still unfolding. H. Dale Hemmerdinger, a reader and New York City property owner, contends that years of misery lie ahead as long-term leases are replaced by new, lower-cost leases. “Costs are front-end loaded,” Hemmerdinger says.

Below is a link to the full article:

http://www.grantspub.com/UserFiles/File/Giro29_SUMMER11.pdf