Where’s the Tipping Point for Commercial Real Estate?
Take a trip to your local mall, and your first instinct could be to side with Zell. By simply counting empty stores, even rookie investors would get the sense that the retail side of commercial real estate is still in big trouble. But other commercial properties aren’t faring any better, as many office and small warehousing facilities sit vacant. So if Zell and others believe things will get worse, how can we identify the real bottom in commercial real estate? Unfortunately, nobody can pinpoint it with 100% accuracy. But we can take a look at history and come up with a very good guess. And the results may surprise you… The Three Stages of All Economic Downturns If you haven’t read Ken Rogoff’s book, called This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, do yourself a favor and check it out. It’s a definitive work, describing how the long history of financial cycles fits in with the current banking crash. According to Rogoff, “the worm is turning” and if what he believes is
